Since 2008, the year of the impact of the financial and economic crisis in Europe, many decisional processes have been subjected to a progressive re-nationalization tendency. The last reforms of EU Cohesion Policy have included some measures—the definition of the plans and the allocation process of the funds through national programmes and the thematic concentration—that are considered the expression of the centralization of powers and competencies that challenge the whole complex system of governance relations in Europe. These centralized trends impacted the territorial governance, the place-based approach to regional development, and the role of regions in policy making itself. This chapter aims to shed light on a specific historical period in which it has been experimented a declining support for territorial approaches in European policy making by presenting a complete definition of concept of territorial governance and by deeply discussing the theoretical framework in which regions have started to activate themselves and to participate to decisional processes at European level.
Top1. The Roots Of Multi-Level And Territorial Governance: The Phenomenon Of Subnational Mobilization In European Union Studies
The bulk of European Studies’ literature is mainly focused on European Union integration and on the relational dynamics among the actors involved in this process. More exactly many early researches were based on power’ relations inside the European decisional arenas and on the different actors’ capacity to influence, shape and define EU policy-making. Liesbet-Hooghe (1995) theorized three different models that represent three distinct interpretative lenses that are useful in order to understand the heterogeneous points of views about the European governance relations’ system and the changing role of the subnational level through the years. The first model is the so-called state- centric one, in which European integration is seen as “an international regime, designed by sovereign states which each seek to manage economic interdependence by engaging in international collaboration”. In this sense it is possible to affirm that the main presumption of the state-centric model is that the European integration did not really challenge the power and the autonomy of the nation-states (Mann 1994, Milward 1992, Moravcsik 1991,1993,1994, Streeck 1996). By adopting the state-centric approach the European integration and the related EU decisional processes are the result of the simple bargaining among the national governments inside the various member states; hence the supranational actors exercise a little independent effect - they help the member states to have the proper information and to facilitate the definition of agreements- and the subnational level is not considered as an effective level of government (Marks, Hooghe, Blank 1996). The second model, traditionally the competitor of the first abovementioned model, is the supranational model in which the polity is the result of shared competencies distributed among EU institutions and constituent governing bodies. The third and last model, considered as the alternative and opposite view in comparison to the state-centric, emerged during the years of the ratification of the Maastricht treaty 1992-1993, and it is the multi-level governance (MLG) model. MLG model considers the European integration process as “a polity creating process in which authority and policy making influence are shared across multiple levels of government – subnational, national and supranational” (Marks 1992, 1993, Hooghe 1996). In this sense the polity is multi-layered, with multiple actors who are not only public but also societal or private players also identified in “territorial stakeholders” category, and “interlocked arenas for political contest”. With the multi-level governance model is possible to describe the whole of decisional processes that “engage various independent but interdependent stakeholders” for which there is not an unique and “exclusive decision making powers’ system nor a stable hierarchies of authority” (European Commission 2015).These models deliver different levels of analysis on the governance relations and on role the subnational actors (regional and local) in the EU policy-making and explain the main expectations about the same subnational mobilization phenomenon. With the term subnational mobilization is meant the complex phenomenon of regional activation in the European policy making, more exactly, the consistent and progressive attempt of regions to directly bring, without any national intermediation, to EU institutions their territorial interests, to participate to the EU policy-making processes and to shape and influence the content of cohesion policy. Starting with the analysis of the state centric model is possible to affirm that all the transnational links and contacts among subnational actors and the EU institutions are limited because they need anyway the intermediation of the national governments. Here the governance relations are seen as vertical and hierarchical and member states play the role of gatekeepers. Taking into account the supranational model instead, subnational mobilization is part of the power challenge and support to supranational authorities. In this sense regions and other subnational actors compete with member states for the control of territorial interests and aggregation of them. Last, the multi-level governance model, also considered as the basis of the territorial governance one, is the first in which the power, the authority and the effective capacity to influence the content of European policy is a melange of shared competencies among the various actors, consequently subnational level is considered an important governmental actor whose access to the European arena is not mediated by the central role of the member states. In this model relations among the various levels of government are not hierarchical but based on the concept of the interdependence. Interdependence can be seen as the key word in the multi-level governance because the various actors and policy arenas are not actually nested but interconnected. The development and the evolution of these models over the years, their use in the literature production as theoretical frameworks have highlighted different conceptions and ideas about the phenomenon of the subnational mobilization and the related regional interests’ representation in Europe. Gary Marks and Mc Adam (1992,1993) have refined the logic for the subnational interest affirming that the subnational interest formation in the European Union should be the pointer to the nature of the Europolity: state-centric, supranational or multi-layered. As related reflection, what should be added here is that it is possible to point out a “mutual and bi-directional link” among regional interests formation and the EU-polity. Hence also the nature of the Europolity- often shaped not only by endogenous factors but even by exogenous factors- can be considered as a reliable pointer in defying the process of interests formation at the subnational level. The affirmation of this reciprocal link among regions, their representation at European level and the direction of the EU polity helped to overtake, at least in part, the classical view in which the multi-level governance model was considered as “pluralist but with an elitist bias; in the sense that only actors (regions) with valuable resources are likely to extract participation” (Hooghe 1995). This strong relation among the phenomenon of subnational mobilization, the Europeanization -meant as the emergence and the development at European level of institutions that formalize interactions among various actors (Green Cowles, Caporaso and Risse 2001) the development of interaction networks among national, internal and supranational actors during the input phase and the gradual and diversified diffusion of values, general norms and specific directives from European institutions to the various levels and ambits belonging to the different member states- and the consequent regionalization is crucial. Hence this relation explains not only the increasing participation of regions as policy actors to the EU policy arenas but also the affirmation of the multi-level governance that sheds light on the key-role played by the territorial relation. So starting from the analysis of the subnational mobilization and regional participation and by taking into consideration the evolution of the MLG model it has been possible to describe and outline the interrelated concept of territorial governance.