Abstract
ABSTRACTThe local governments of EU member countries are attracted to the possibility of receiving EU funding. However, as the governance structures of EU funds are complex and dynamic, municipalities are increasingly drawing on the knowledge and resources of ‘EU experts’ who mediate and provide project support. This article contributes to our understanding of how EU cohesion policy is translated through EU projects, with a specific focus on the processes of preparing and applying for project funding. Drawing on education policy, this study analyses a tool which has been developed to facilitate and increase the number of EU projects in the Swedish region of Scania. The analysis shows that regional mediation – and the ambition to reframe local policies into EU projects – entails substantive as well as organizational changes in two aspects. First, the policy content shifts from the realm of education policy to the realms of collaborative development policy, social cohesion and innovation, and second, the translation entails an organizational shift from permanent public education administration to temporary project organizations. These processes are conceptualized as the re-compartmentalization of local policies.
Highlights
How can local government organizations navigate in the context of EU project funding? And how is knowledge mediated and translated from the EU to municipalities in these processes? Project funding and project organizing have become an essential and integral part of EU policy-making on different levels during the recent decades
Our analysis focused on the EU project analyses (EPA), a process with the explicit ambition of ‘fitting’ local policy goals and priorities into the framework of EU funding opportunities
The new problematizations, in turn, render the education issues at hand to be perceived in new ways, as development policies to be dealt with through EU funding in temporary collaborative organizations and projects instead of problems within the education system to be dealt within the existing educational system and the ordinary municipal budget
Summary
How can local government organizations navigate in the context of EU project funding? And how is knowledge mediated and translated from the EU to municipalities in these processes? Project funding and project organizing have become an essential and integral part of EU policy-making on different levels during the recent decades (cf. Büttner and Leopold 2016, 42). Regardless of whether the municipalities themselves perceived the problem as poor results, drop-outs or the decreasing eligibility to enter higher education, the problem was problematized as either as (a) lack of competence and skills development among staff and solved through different programs for increasing skills, including transnational development projects (so-called cross-loading) and best practices or (b) young people experiencing social problems understood in terms of employability and social exclusion, and solved through collaborations and temporary projects In these processes, problems that were conceived of as belonging to the educational realm in municipal documents were problematized in new ways in order to fit the prioritized municipal points into the EU-funding framework
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