Public Policy Planning

𝗔 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗘𝘂𝗿𝗼𝗽𝗲, 𝗼𝗿 𝗷𝘂𝘀𝘁 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗽𝗼𝗹𝗶𝗰𝘆? Europe’s cohesion debate has acquired a new moral vocabulary. In their brand new 𝘌𝘶𝘳𝘰𝘱𝘦𝘢𝘯 𝘗𝘭𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘚𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘦𝘴 article, Panagiotis Artelaris and George Mavrommatis argue that the #EU is edging away from a narrow fixation on regional #GDP gaps towards something more ambitious: enabling people, not merely balancing territories. The article contends that the Agenda’s promise of “a sustainable future for all places and people in Europe” signals a subtle but meaningful shift. Territorial #cohesion is no longer just about redistributing #resources across space. It increasingly speaks the language of interpersonal #inequality, well-being and #opportunity. This is what the European Committee of the Regions has termed “interpersonal cohesion”. To make sense of this shift, the authors enlist Amartya Sen. Rawls asked whether primary goods are fairly distributed. Sen asks whether individuals can convert those goods into real freedoms, or to transform them into capabilities to live lives they have reason to value. In that distinction lies the paper’s central claim: Cohesion Policy must move beyond infrastructure and income to consider what people can actually do with the opportunities available to them. Yet here lies the paradox. The #EU's social investment paradigm, though rhetorically aligned with empowerment, remains tethered to #employability and #labour market activation. It invests in human capital, but often within a narrow economic frame. Artelaris and Mavrommatis suggest that without territorial sensitivity and a broader conception of plural capabilities —cultural, social, environmental, political— social investment risks reinforcing the very spatial inequalities it seeks to soften. Their proposed synthesis is not a new funding instrument, but a new evaluative logic. Regional programmes, operating under shared management, could become arenas of “public reasoning”, where citizens deliberate on which capabilities matter most in their specific contexts: be that mobility in remote #rural areas, affordable #housing in overheated #cities, or access to healthcare in #ageing regions. In this reading, “place” is not a backdrop but a lived context shaping opportunity. For them, a Just #Europe cannot be reduced to compensation or green transition. It must allow people, wherever they live, to define the freedoms they seek. And, as importantly, provide the resources to make those freedoms substantive rather than symbolic. In an era marked by “left-behind places” and expanding geographies of discontent, the article suggests that cohesion’s future lies not in technocratic recalibration, but in democratised capability-building. The full article is available here: https://lnkd.in/eCRTZNwk

Across Europe, policymakers increasingly recognise that development challenges do not align neatly with administrative boundaries. Economic transitions, demographic change, climate risks, and access to services play out differently across places and often across functional geographies shaped by commuting patterns, labour markets, infrastructure networks, and ecological systems. In response, there is a growing trend toward experimentation with place-based approaches in both EU and national policies, as well as in spatial planning systems. These approaches seek to move beyond one-size-fits-all interventions by tailoring policy responses to the specific needs, capacities, and trajectories of territories. From functional urban areas and metropolitan regions to inner, rural, and peripheral territories, territorial instruments are increasingly used to translate strategic objectives into context-sensitive action. This shift raises a key question: how are nationally designed territorial instruments actually being used to design territorially sensitive policies—and what added value do they bring? The new ESPON SENPO study, to which we contributed, helps provide answers. Drawing on in-depth case studies from Poland, the Netherlands, France, Italy, and Germany, the study explores how territorial instruments of national policies are designed and used to respond to diverse territorial challenges, from metropolitan growth pressures to the long-term sustainability of peripheral and rural areas. What does the study show? 🔹 Territorial instruments matter, not only for delivering infrastructure and services, but for embedding place-based thinking into governance systems 🔹 Their added value often lies beyond tangible outputs, in strategic coordination, cross-sectoral integration, and long-term territorial capacity-building 🔹 Addressing functional socio-economic linkages across space (rather than administrative boundaries alone) is crucial for effective policy design 🔹 Stronger integration with spatial planning systems and Cohesion Policy enhances coherence, efficiency, and territorial sensitivity 🔹 Multi-level and participatory governance arrangements, combining top-down direction with bottom-up knowledge, are key to success In sum, this study provides concrete insights into how territorial instruments can be used proactively to reduce disparities, prevent harm to territorial cohesion, and design place-sensitive policies. 📄 Full report here: https://lnkd.in/eCXd3e84 #territorialinstruments #spatialplanning #EUCohesionPolicy ESPON Programme, European Policies Research Centre Department of Urbanism, Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, TU Delft, Stefan Kah, Martin Ferry, Odilia van der Valk, Megha Sahu

... The solutions we propose at the local, regional, national and global scales have to be interlinked in such a way that they become mutually reinforcing and supporting. Policy and governance needs to enable local and regional problem-solving rather than impede it by generalized regulations that do not adequately reflect the local conditions of a specific ecosystem and culture. Paying close attention to the uniqueness of place and regional culture reveals opportunities for transformative innovation and preservation of biocultural diversity. ... https://lnkd.in/euPauNK

New Working Paper: Municipalities’ role in regional development: Navigating subsidiarity, place-based approaches, and geographical variation. This paper sheds light on the role of local authorities in place-based development processes. Even though place is associated with the local, EU cohesion policy implementation arrangements target the regional level with little attention to the local level in policy practice and research. This links to the concept of subsidiarity, which is a fundamental EU policy principle demanding policies to be designed and implemented as close as possible to citizens. Moreover, in the wake of widespread discontent expressed by citizens through e.g., yellow vest movements, protest voting, and anti-EU sentiments, one of the main goals of the EU is to bring Europe closer to citizens. The involvement of local authorities, which is the level of governance closest to citizens, becomes thus paramount. The conclusion of this paper is that the enactment of the principle of subsidiarity is suboptimal in the context of the investigated three Nordic countries. The mandate of municipalities for regional development work remains undefined even though they are in many ways the strongest and most institutionalized sub-national levels of government in the three countries, have mandates that are related to regional development, and are dependent on regional development for sourcing tax income. Despite the lack of mandate, municipalities are involved in placebased development in all cases although in different ways, and with different outcomes, which relates to the context in which the municipalities are embedded. Consequently, to live up to the expectations of the principle of subsidiarity and bringing Europe closer to citizens, it would be necessary to clarify and articulate the mandates and roles of local authorities in place-based policy approaches vis-à-vis the regional and national level, and develop implementation arrangements, which are attentive to the uneven capabilities and structural constraints of local authorities to perform regional development work. With Linda Stihl Brita Hermelin https://lnkd.in/d957muHA The Department of Human Geography, Lund University CIRCLE, Lund University

#Trust in the EU is lowest in #rural areas, and the urban-rural gap has continued to widen in recent years. Research from the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission shows that rural citizens are less inclined to trust the EU or national governments than people living in cities or towns. At the same time, more than 50% have high levels of trust in their regional and local authorities, regardless of their views on the EU. This gap reinforces the case for more locally grounded decision-making in rural areas. The data also indicate that trust in institutions varies widely across Member States: rural trust in the EU ranges from only 35% in France to 75% in Lithuania, showing significant differences behind the EU-wide averages. Moreover, findings suggest that lower levels of education, financial difficulties, and less qualified jobs, which are more common in rural areas, may be linked to lower trust in the EU. Given rural citizens' higher trust in their local authorities, policies designed with a place-based approach and a focus on local needs may help strengthen trust in the EU while also supporting territorial cohesion. The study can be found below: 📑 https://lnkd.in/eWqGaaEE