The EU cohesion Policy in Central and Eastern Europe, a Tool for Innovation?

Abstract

Globalisation has paradoxical territorial effects. On the one hand, it erodes local and regional particularisms and convinces a large number of elected local officials and citizens that it deprives them of the levers of action they thought they possessed. On the other hand, the change of paradigm in the reflection on territorial development has led to depreciating the simple logic of redistribution in the national framework and increasing the status of endogenous development, local initiative and multiscalar strategies. The process of decentralisation, the erosion of national frameworks through the effect of European construction and the new organisation of the value chain in the firm have in other respects given a new meaning to territorial development policies. The implementation of the European regional development policy, supposed to work in favour of local and regional authorities, coincides with a renewal of reflection on the role of local actors in the development process. The European Union has the distinctive characteristic of being the area having the most successfully deepened regional integration and, at the same time, granting the highest importance to the reduction of regional disparities. A third of the Union’s budget is indeed devoted to regions lagging in development; which is to say a 213 billion euro envelope for the 2000-2006 programming period. With the adhesion in 2004 and 2007 of twelve economies whose GDP was inferior by half to that of the existing Union, the challenges of solidarity and convergence present themselves henceforth in different terms. While the disparities have considerably worsened from the statistical point of view, the Union has not given up reducing them. A 308 billion euro budget has been allocated to regional policy for the 2007-2013 programming period and certain new Member States will have at their disposal an allocation equivalent to 3.5 per cent of their GDP. The principal challenge for regional policy is to compensate for the lagging behind of the ex-communist countries in physical facilities, notably those concerning protection of the environment and transport infrastructure. Modernisation cannot, however, rest solely on catching up in this domain. It supposes as well an improvement in quality that a policy of innovation and education could make