Abstract
This paper provides new insights into the main pillars of the territorial universe of EU policies, by undertaking a systematic overview of European Union (EU) key territorial development reports, agendas and programmes. These include the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP), the three Territorial Agendas, and the European Territorial Observatory Network (ESPON) reports. The evidence shows widespread territorialicy, understood as a process of incorporating a territorial driven policy design, implementation and evaluation paradigm, still largely dominated by territorial development and territorial cohesion policy rationales. However, the socioeconomic policy prism continues to dominate the design and analysis of EU policies by EU entities.
Highlights
By the end of 2016, when invited to speak in an INTERACT workshop in Berlin, the author requested the audience, made mostly by European Union (EU) INTERREG programmes’ directors and officials, to write on a white board what was for them the definition of territorial cohesion
This paper aims to contribute towards the increasing attention given to the territorial dimension of policies and how it should be analysed
It does so by presenting a theoretical framework with seven main pillars and respective components of a territorial universe for territorialicy, understood as a process of incorporating a territorial driven policy design, implementation and evaluation paradigm. These pillars and components were selected based on EU territorial driven policy documents (ESDP, territorial agendas (TA)) and relevant literature, and were used to assess the degree of territorialicy of the ESPON programme, the EU cohesion reports and the DG REGIO development policies
Summary
By the end of 2016, when invited to speak in an INTERACT workshop in Berlin, the author requested the audience, made mostly by EU INTERREG programmes’ directors and officials, to write on a white board what was for them the definition of territorial cohesion. A wealth of literature underscores and amplifies the challenges related to obtaining a commonly agreed definition for the territorial cohesion concept (Luukkonen & Moilanen, 2012; Van Well, 2012; Abrahams, 2014; Medeiros, 2016a; Dao, Cantoreggi & Rousseaux, 2017). These challenges are, for the most part, related largely with a misunderstanding of the concept of territory, in particular in relation to the implementation of policies. From a pure conceptual perspective, territory is a bounded space where a group of individuals exert some kind of control and sovereignty (Delaney, 2009)
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