Abstract
Recognising demographically declining areas in EU Cohesion Policy: a Case-Study of Multilevel Coalition Building
Highlights
The EU has previously considered the issue of demographic decline, this has not had materialised into specific EU policy interventions, save for the ad hoc funding arrangement for sparsely populated northern Finland and Sweden
The Commission’s 7th Report on Economic, Social and Territorial Cohesion (2017) appeared to signal that, for the 2021-2027 EU budget programming period, the new generation of EU Cohesion Policy funds and Regulations would make their EU Structural Funds have demographic decline as a cross-cutting priority of the EU Structural Funds, precisely building on some of the above-mentioned academic cases (some of that at least indirectly supported by the Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO) and some of its senior officials e.g. the “Geography of EU discontent” (Dijkstra et al 2018))
Making use of the Committee of the Regions (CoR) as an EU advisory role (yet a rather effective one in using its EU institutional embedding to act as a territorial policy entrepreneur to influence EU legislation (Piattoni and Schönlau, 2015)), the above mentioned small ad hoc group -this author included- suggested the CoR proposal on the European Regional Development Fund Regulation, the Rijsberman Opinion (2018) included the following definition: Figure 1: The definition of areas with demographic haps
Summary
The EU has previously considered the issue of demographic decline (e.g. the 2006 European Commission’s Communication and European Parliament’s Report, and under the present Ursula Von der Leyen’s Commission has a dedicated Vice Presidency), this has not had materialised into specific EU policy interventions (in EU Cohesion or Rural Development Policy funding), save for the ad hoc funding arrangement for sparsely populated northern Finland and Sweden. As a result of this, a small ad hoc coalition of Spanish actors (no more than a dozen involving territorial representatives – this author included -, a mayor and academically supported by like-minded EU officials and MEPs) mobilized to fill that gap, starting with crafting and lobbying a definition of what is a demographically declining territory for the purposes of targeting EU cohesion fund to those areas.
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