Dr. Fabian Gal (p), Prof Sébastien Bourdin

Administrative burden is well-documented as a barrier to access in social policy, yet its operation in territorial development policies remains theoretically underdeveloped. This article examines how administrative burden restricts access to EU Cohesion Policy, analysing ERDF and ESF implementation in the French region of Auvergne–Rhône-Alpes. Drawing on 52 semi-structured interviews, documentary analysis, participant observation, and a beneficiary survey, it identifies two pathways through which administrative burden generates differential exclusion: stringent verification requirements that produce compliance and psychological costs filtering out lower-capacity organisations, and coordination failures that generate ambiguity raising information and compliance costs for less-resourced actors. A third pathway — inter-organisational cooperation as a mitigating mechanism — is shown to operate selectively, reproducing rather than correcting the insider advantage it theoretically counters. The findings reveal a paradox of administrative cohesion: a policy designed to correct territorial inequalities systematically excludes the actors it is most intended to reach.

Dr. Tongjing Wang (p), Prof. André Torre, Prof. Maryline Filippi

The European Union's Cohesion Policy aims to promote territorial convergence, yet Smart Specialisation Strategies (S3) can reinforce regional divergence by favoring high technological complexity over the soft innovation strengths of non-urban areas, such as Cultural and Creative Industries (CCIs). S3 also operates mainly at NUTS 2, where regions rarely align with urban–rural divisions, so aggregate indicators can obscure rural needs in priority setting, project selection, and evaluation. Together, these gaps narrow the range of rural initiatives that qualify as innovation in S3 portfolios.
CCIs provide an empirical lens for these governance and scale mismatches, as they sit at the intersection of soft innovation, place-based identity, and multi-level governance. Besides S3, Rural CCI work also draws on LEADER under the Common Agricultural Policy, and Creative Europe, yet coordination across these instruments remains limited, producing fragmented support in peripheral territories.
The paper proposes a framework for a more coherent policy mix that can complement S3 support on rural CCI development. It compares CCI-related S3 projects in the Kohesio database with CCI-related LEADER projects in the EU CAP Network database, complemented by evidence on Creative Europe access patterns. S3 allocation is disaggregated to NUTS 3 to make urban and non-urban patterns visible.
Findings highlight three linked mismatches. First, LEADER-supported rural CCIs are often hybrid practices using creative activity to address practical challenges tied to local services and community infrastructure, yet their small budgets and short cycles constrain durable capability building. Second, urban and non-urban CCIs are fundamentally different: urban projects target digital and entertainment industries, while non-urban projects concentrate on infrastructure and heritage renovation, which is a poor fit with S3 innovation priorities that leaves no reliable step-up route from community-led practice to larger investment. Third, Creative Europe remains difficult to access for locally embedded work because competitive calls favour formalisation and high-visibility outputs.
Based on these results, the paper proposes a mission-oriented policy mix that treats CCIs as a component of territorial cohesion and resilience. The proposal positions LAGs as intermediaries that translate local demand into investment-relevant formats, adds an S3 step-up track for soft innovation and peripheral capability building. Creative Europe can provide lower-threshold networking and circulation formats that connect mature local practices to wider learning and exchange. Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI) offer an underused governance format that could coordinate these cross-instrument actions within urban–rural functional areas, targeting cumulative impact rather than isolated projects in separate policy lanes.

Dr. Dagmara Kociuba (p)

The introduction of a place-based approach to the programming of the EU 2014-2020 cohesion policy required the creation of new territorial governance structures, the identification of new areas of intervention and the development of new mechanisms for the distribution of funds. The implementation of a new cohesion policy tool, Integrated Territorial Investments (ITIs), dedicated to supporting the sustainable development of cities and their functional areas, played a key role in this process.
This paper focuses on identifying the main challenges for introducing PBPs in functional urban areas (FUAs) in the context of lessons learned from the implementation of ITIs in Poland.
The research was divided into three stages. The first stage outlined the main ITIs assumptions and the effects of their implementation in the form of formalizing inter-municipal partnerships reflected in the delimitation of the area of intervention, creating territorial governance mechanisms and strategic planning rules, as well as highlighting the changes that have taken place in the 2021-2027 cycle. In the second stage, these were compared with the perspective of actors involved in the implementation of ITIs based on the results of a questionnaire survey conducted in 50 FUAs. Three dimensions were analyzed in detail: cooperative, institutional, and programming. In the third stage, recommendations were formulated to improve the effectiveness of implementation PBPs in FUAs.
The results of the research indicate that the reorientation of cohesion policy towards more integrated actions tailored to the needs of specific FUAs had far-reaching consequences for: 1) multi-level governance through the intensification of establishing and formalizing cooperation between municipalities at both the horizontal and vertical levels; 2) strategic planning through the requirement to develop a long-term strategy tailored to specific territorial characteristics; 3) the distribution of financial resources towards the integration of funds and programs in order to achieve synergies in investments supporting the endogenous potential of territories. The key issues for the effective implementation of ITIs included: meeting formal and legal requirements, reformulating existing cooperation schemes, and integrating spatial and financial actions on a supra-local scale
The results of the study provide decision-makers with guidelines for effective programming of cohesion policy interventions in 2028-2034.

Dr. Ana Viñuela (p)

The World Bank outlines five characteristics of the left-behind regions (or lagging regions): i) some are more dynamic than others, ii) there are “low income” and “low growth” regions, and both have the lowest social outcomes iii) demographic decline is a defining feature of lagging regions, with both fertility and net migration rates that fall below the national averages, iv) they are peripheral, but not necessarily sparse and v) jobs in lagging regions are concentrated in low value-added non-tradables.
In Europe, the present Cohesion Policy has changed the focus from traditional regions to places and people; thus it would be important to characterize and identify the left-behind “places” (and also the left-behind “people”). If following the World Bank criteria, very little can be said about the existence and persistence of these places basically due to the unavailability of GDP/income figures at a finer spatial scale than NUTS regions in the official European databases. As for the rest of socioeconomic variables mentioned by the World Bank (such as demographic, labour or geographic indicators). there is simply no comprehensive European database at local level (LAUs).
In the EXIT Project we estimated figures of average household income at local level and also collect country by country the socioeconomic variables existing at local level for years 2011 and 2021 in order to characterize, identify and illustrate the multidimensional and relative nature of the elusive left-behindness concept when applied at local level.

Dr. Anna Kyosova (p)

This study uses a town-level spatial panel data set to analyze how exposed companies are to European Union funded project activities and the spillovers of these activities in Bulgaria during 2014 – 2026. The study uses project entry data from all EU funded projects (total of N = 73,783) including geographic coordinates and harmonized town identifier for all EU funded projects in Bulgaria (a total of 2,302 towns). We compiled an administrative database of all EU supported initiatives in Bulgaria during that time frame; it contains program codes, details regarding the beneficiaries (such as public/private status), financial data, and geographic information for each initiative. After standardizing the place name and geocoding to lat/long, we aggregated the data into a balanced panel of towns and years (covering 2302 towns and 13 start year cohorts).
The descriptive results show that EU funded projects are highly concentrated geographically and temporally, with many EU funded projects initiated at the same time, such as when large programmatic cycles occur or in response to crises. There is also significant primacy of capital cities with Sofia having an order of magnitude more project starts and grant volume than most other towns, therefore the authors include logarithmic transformations in their visualizations and diagnostic tests to account for this. Visualizations of the project starts and spillover exposures show positive co-movements between project starts in localities and spillover exposures to nearby localities, indicating that there is a relationship between project allocations and/or localized implementation systems for EU funded projects.
In addition, the research provides a reproducible R code to build town-year panels and spillover indicators, thereby providing a methodological contribution to the regional science literature studying EU cohesion policy. The EU funded project activity panel data set and spillover indicators developed in this study can be used as input variables for downstream causal analyses (such as fixed effect models, event studies, and spatial econometric models) to investigate whether the impact of EU funded projects are limited to treated localities, and whether EU funded projects have different types of spatial diffusion depending upon whether the project is implemented by a government entity (public) or a business entity (private).