Maria Karanika (p), Dimitris Kalliorias

From ancient times to the present, where the process of globalization that is characterized by the integration of economic relations and interdependencies at the global level on evolutionary way, human beings have understood completely the multiplicity of all aspects and the importance of spatial transformations. The EU aligned with this component and included a strong territorial dimension in the design and implementation of cohesion policy. More than 18 years after the adoption of the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) in Potsdam (1999), the adoption of the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (2008) and its inclusion in the Treaty of Lisbon (2009) as one of the three main pillars of the EU Cohesion Policy, the concept of Territorial Cohesion still strongly attracts the interest of academics, scientists and EU policy makers, considering that it is imperative for the development of the European territory.
Along with the gradual identification of territorial cohesion and the territorial impacts as it was launched in the "Territorial State and Perspectives of the European Union" document, the Fifth Cohesion Report and the Europe 2020 Strategy another one, a second generation Territorial Agenda for the EU was emerged, which led to the adoption in Gödöllő in Hungary in 2011, a revised "Territorial Agenda of the European Union 2020" as an extension and an enhanced form of the Territorial Agenda 2007. Although the revised Territorial Agenda is the driving force of a new generation of discussions on the development of the European area, the existent and persistent territorial asymmetries between the European regions confirms that territorial cohesion is still a fuzzy, elusive and ambiguous notion, which is applicable in uncomprehensive way by EU political and technical institutions.
In this context, this article aims to highlight the importance of territorial dimension in the process of development and how the concept of territorial cohesion is a guarantee for the designation of the strength of the European space. Drawing upon information from the existing literature and through a critical study of the political EU texts, this paper examines the various explanation which have attributed to the territorial cohesion and the vary ways which territorial cohesion can be achieved. In particular, this article mainly focus in the conceptual approach of territorial cohesion, in terms of space, and argues that the insufficient understanding of the notion of territorial cohesion attribute to the insufficient understanding of the unique subject of action, the European territory.

Daniela Constantin (p)

Services of General Interest (SGI) represent one of the ’territorial keys’ able to add value to the territorial dimension of the development policy, along with accessibility, territorial capacities, city networking and functional regions (Lindblat, 2011). Making SGI accessible to all areas, including the remote ones, is a way of harmonising the EU places through territorial cohesion. At the same time, regional competitiveness and territorial cohesion are closely related to the territorial capacity of each area, pointing to those localised assets which determine the competitive potential of a given territory. SGI and territorial capital share issues of joint interest when it comes to location, local resources, agglomeration economies, quality of life, welfare regime, territorial governance, etc. This paper proposes a discussion on the two-way relationship between SGI and territorial cohesion and territorial capital: on the one hand, the role of SGI is examined from the viewpoint of its contribution, in relation to territorial capital, to strengthening territorial cohesion; on the other hand, is explored the impact of the territorial capital and territorial cohesion policy on SGI. In this context the basic trends and key challenges – demographic, economic, social, environmental and political ones – to SGI are analysed from the perspective of the Europe 2020 orientations so as to underpin the 2014-2020 cohesion policy measures seeking to support the effective provision of SGI to the large variety of EU territories. The paper is based on the author’s contribution to the ESPON project „Indicators and Perspectives for Services of General Interest in Territorial Cohesion and Development”, as a member and coordinator of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies’ team, one of the project partners.

Roberta Capello, Giovanni Perucca (p)

Most of the literature on Cohesion Policy analysed its impact on economic growth and convergence, the primary goals of this Communitarian program. Another objective, which received much less attention, is the contribution of Cohesion Policy to the process of European identity building. This goal is secondary but not at all irrelevant, since the future of Cohesion Policy and of the European Union (EU) itself depends on the willingness of citizens to share the values and strategies of the Communitarian institutions, as demonstrated by the British referendum on Brexit and the insurgence of nationalist parties in many EU countries. The present paper contributes to the understanding of the mechanisms through which Cohesion Policy creates EU identity in two ways. First, it provides a conceptual framework explaining how the actions undertaken within the Communitarian regional policy program are assumed to increase EU identity, suggesting that a determinant role in this process is played by some specific characteristics of the local policy settings where the policies are implemented. Second, the paper will present and discuss the results of an empirical study on the determinants of the perception of Cohesion policy actions across EU NUTS2 regions. This analysis makes use of a large data set from a survey study conducted by Eurobarometer in 2010. Our results point out that the territorial characteristics of the local policy settings matter in explaining the different perception of Cohesion policy. More in details, when policies are able to match the objective needs of regions with the priorities of the resident population, the satisfaction with EU actions reaches its highest level. These results convey relevant implications for the future design and communication strategies of Cohesion Policy.

Maaike Damen (p), Hans Vedder (p)

The Structural Funds, instruments of the European Cohesion Policy, are known because for their ‘audit explosion’(Mendez and Bachtler) and problems with the implementation, leading to high error rates (5,2% in 2015, European Court of Auditors, 2015). These problems lead to the question of what causes these problems and how to improve the implementation. This paper argues that a system of principle based collaborative governance, which is currently not seen in Cohesion Policy, would enable all actors in the system to work together towards a stable implementation. The paper draws on the practice of ERDF implementation in the northern part of the Netherlands.
Principle based collaborative governance builds on the vast literature on collaborative governance, although in its application to the practice of ERDF it is used in a situation that is characterized by mainly public actors. The concept of collaborative governance is expanded by the basic premise that collaborative governance is supposed to based on shared principles, thus having actors working towards a shared goal. However, in the situation of ERDF in the Netherlands, all those actors, such as the European Commission, the national ministry responsible for the implementation (EZ), the Audit Authority and the Management Authority, are supposed to work together in a situation of collaborative governance. The current situation, though, is characterized by a lack of trust and actors that encounter escalating conflicts. (Algemene Rekenkamer, 2012, p. 56).
The paper uses examples from other policy areas in European law, the governance of Services of General Economic Interest and the regulation of gas transportation and electricity networks to show how principle based collaborative governance can work and fail. These examples also show how actors in the multilevel system of European law search for a balance between nitpicking and abstract assessment of the situation and a review of substantive outcomes and correct procedure.
The paper concludes with an assessment of how principle based collaborative governance could work out in the case of Cohesion Policy, and what the effect of it will be. This requires all actors to reflect on their role in the system as the paper pleads for more trust in the system of the practical implementation of Cohesion Policy.