Cohesion policies: place
based approach
Cohesion policy: a
controversial issue

Cohesion policy is an highly controversial
issue
 Who pays for cohesion policy?
 Is cohesion policy really useful?
 Why should Europe be involved in cohesion
policy?
The place-based approach

The Barca report and the place-based
approach
 What is a place within the framework of a
place-based policy
What is a place

Place can be defined as a contiguous area within
whose boundaries a set of conditions conducive to
development apply more than they do across
boundaries: natural and cultural circumstances
and the preferences of people are more
homogeneous or complementary, the knowledge of
people is more synergic and positive externalities
and informal and formal institutions are more
likely to arise.
The two objectives of
cohesion policy

The two objectives of the cohesion policy:
efficiency and equity
 Potential trade-offs between these two
objectives
 Optimal policies to pursue efficiency may
not be optimal policies to pursue equity and
vice-versa
The two objectives of
cohesion policy

These two objectives must then be pursued
through different measures
Definition of a place-based
policy

A place-based development policy can therefore
be defined as
– -a long term development strategy whose objective is
to reduce persistent inefficiency and inequality in
specific places
Definition of a place-based
policy
– through the production of bundles of integrated place tailored
public goods and services designed and implemented by eliciting
and aggregating local preferences and knowledge through
participatory political institutions and by establishing linkages
with other places
– promoted from outside the place by a system of multilevel
governance where grants subjects to conditionalities on both
objectives and institutions are transferred from higher to lower
levels of government.
Efficiency

The main objective of cohesion policy is
efficiency
 All regions have, to a greater or lesser extent,
underutilized resources
 Efficiency means full utilization of existing
endogenous immobile resources but also
expansion of these resources exploiting all the
possibilities of attracting mobile resources over
time within a framework of sustainable
development.
Efficiency

The primary goal of cohesion policy is the
enhancing of these underutilized economic
resources
 Cohesion policy is a development policy
and not a redistributive policy
 Convergence is not the primary goal of
cohesion policies
Cohesion policies as
exogenous policies

Cohesion policies must be exogenous
policies
 Two crucial reasons for that:
– To avoid the risks of capture of local elites
– To break path dependency
Cohesion polices must be
place-based

Cohesion policies must be place-based
 This means that a) these policies must be
designed to suit specific territories and b)
that local actors must have a leading role
in their elaboration and implementation
Cohesion polices must be
place-based

Policies must be designed to suit specific
territories because people needs and institutions
are different
 People needs and preferences depend on the local
context
 Policies must take fully account of these territorial
differences
Cohesion polices must be
place-based

The effectiveness of institutions depend as
well on the local context
 Institutions for economic development must
be tailored to suit territorial specificities
 Policies aimed at creating and strengthening
local institutions must therefore take into
account the special features of each
territory.
Cohesion polices must be
place-based

Cohesion policies must be place-based because
local actors have a better knowledge of their
territory.
 Local people is then in the best position to
elaborate and implement policies at territorial
level
Deliberative decision making
processes

Local knowledge is not readily available. It
is fragmented in a variety of individuals and
bodies. It must be extracted, socialized and
increased through deliberative decision
making processes
 An exogenous intervention may be
necessary to convince local people to share
information and knowledge.
Local and external knowledge

Local knowledge does not exhaust all
knowledge is needed.
 It is important to have access to information
and knowledge, wherever it can be found
 Access to outside knowledge is particularly
important for fostering innovation and
technical progress
Focus on public goods

The main goal of cohesion policies is to
provide bundles of integrated public goods
– Public goods increase productivity of firms,
specially of small firms
– Public goods improve people standard of living
– Public goods favour people participation in the
local decision making processes
Focus on public goods

Cohesion policy is a territorial policy and
not a sectorial policy
 This makes possible to implement
integrated programmes
 Integration makes possible the exploitation
of synergies between complementary
interventions
Model of governance

A proper design of the model of governance
is a necessary condition for the success of
cohesion policies
 The proper model of governance for
cohesion policies is multi-level governance
Multilevel governance

This is a system by which the responsibility
for policy design and implementation is
distributed between different levels of
governments and special purposes local
institutions
 In multilevel governance there is not a
division of responsibilities by sector of
intervention but a division of tasks
Multilevel governance

Different institutions and local agencies
cooperate to reach the same aims and
implement the same policies but with
different tasks
Multilevel governance

In multi-level governance, the top levels of
government have responsibility for setting
priorities and general objective and the
contractual framework for the lower levels;
selecting projects and allocating funds to places
and providing linkages between them; promoting
institutional building and learning and monitoring
results and providing technical support and
expertise
Multilevel governance

The lower levels have the responsibility of
eliciting and aggregating the knowledge
and preferences of citizens; designing
projects and appraising them for financing
and implementing projects and managing
learning processes.
Conditionalities

Relations between different levels of
government take a contractual form
 Commitments, conditionality, monitoring
and evaluation are necessary ingredients of
this policy
Decision making at local level

The decision making processes at local level should exhibit
the following ideal features:
– To convince local people to share common information
and knowledge in order to achieve common goals;
– to be highly inclusive promoting the participation of all
those interested in the results of the policy;
– to clearly identify objectives and targets of each
measure
– to favour a learning process adopting an experimental
approach through continuous debate and monitoring