EU Cohesion Policy post-2020, European Green Deal and Territorial Agenda 2030. The future of the place-based approach in the new EU policy framework in the context of COVID-19

Paulo Neto

doi:10.7163/eu21.2020.38.2

Abstract

The European Union’s strategic priorities for the post-2020 period – focused on areas such as globalization, demography, migration, climate change, security and defense, employment and digitalization of the economy and society – pose relevant challenges as to the feasibility of its territorialization conditions and how to ensure operationalization at regional and local levels. As the EU prepares to implement the Cohesion Policy 2021-2027 and draw up the Territorial Agenda 2030, it also seeks to relaunch the EU policy framework in areas such as sustainable development, artificial intelligence and reindustrialization, examples of which are: European Green Deal, EU Circular Economy Action Plan and EU Digital Strategy. The current context of the COVID-19 pandemic has, however, forced a refocusing of the intervention priorities, at least in the short term, in the need to respond to the urgent economic, social and public health challenges caused by the pandemic. This article seeks to analyse, on the one hand, how the European policy cycle has adapted to respond to the pandemic, and on the other, the extent to which the place-based approach, one of the central operating rationales of the 2014-2020 financial perspective, may see its role strengthened and its performance extended as a consequence of the changes introduced in the current phase of the policy cycle due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis carried out led to concluding that the current context of COVID-19 is implying the redesign of many of the Union’s public policy instruments and reordering some of the current strategic priorities. It is also changing the conditions of resilience and competitiveness of territories, whereby the place-based approach seems to be a public policy instrument especially suited to the process of economic and social recovery at the local and regional level.

Highlights

The European Union’s (EU) strategic priorities for the post-2020 period – focused on areas such as globalization, demography, migration, climate change, security and defense, employment and digitalization of the economy and society – pose relevant challenges as to the feasibility of its territorialization conditions and how to ensure operationalization at regional and local levels
Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and public health and civil protection challenges, and in terms of the resulting consequences for the economy, employment and social mobility, many of the strategic priorities defined for the EU at the end of 2019 are being reformulated and adapted to the new context
The OECD (2020a) defends the importance of adopting a place-based, or territorially sensitive, approach to support the definition of exit-strategy implementation and recovery policies from the COVID-19 pandemic

Summary

Introduction

The European Union’s (EU) strategic priorities for the post-2020 period – focused on areas such as globalization, demography, migration, climate change, security and defense, employment and digitalization of the economy and society – pose relevant challenges as to the feasibility of its territorialization conditions and how to ensure operationalization at regional and local levels. It is extremely relevant to analyze the extent to which the COVID-19 pandemic is reformulating and re-hierarchizing the public policy priorities of the Union and reordering the relative position of some current development objectives and some of their relevant parent policies such as the CP On this issue, the OECD (2020a) defends the importance of adopting a place-based, or territorially sensitive, approach to support the definition of exit-strategy implementation and recovery policies from the COVID-19 pandemic. Taking into account that the current pandemic context has revealed different territorial (local and regional) performances in the different EU member states – and many of the containment measures have been established based on municipal and regional incidence indicators – it is relevant to analyze the extent to which the place-based approach may play an important role, as an instrument of public policy, in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic To achieve these objectives, this article is structured in eight main sections.

Literature review

Objectives

Conclusions and recomendations

Findings

Background