Territorial identities and institutional building: strengths and weaknesses of EU policies for territorial cooperation in Southern regions

Abstract

The relevance of specific socio-organisational features has emerged in most contemporary debates on territorial development. Besides physical capital and human capital what seems to be crucial for the development of a territorial system and the enhancement of its endogenous resources in the world economy are the capacity of regulation and mobilisation or its institutions towards local and external productive forces and ‘the sense of identity which allows a population of people and enterprises settled in a territory to recognise themselves as a collective actor and to act so to face problems that grow in the local system’. Also the European Union (EU) recognises the importance of those ‘soft’ factors in development, especially since the 1988 reform of its regional policy. The new approach chimes with the EU’s increasing propensity in filling democratic deficit gaps through the use of deliberative practices: the organisational fields framed by the Commission—through specific actions, policy regulations, working documents—provide an incentive for stakeholders to participate in decision-making processes following common rules aiming for the collective definition of goals and objectives. In this manner Lowi’s provocative statement ‘policy makes politics’ could become the rule rather than the exception in the EU, where intergovernmental processes are increasingly preceded by the implementation of policies aiming to ‘Europeanise’ its territories—that is, to apply common rules, practices and values in highly divergent institutional systems and social contexts. The growing relevance of these processes explains the diffusion in recent years of ‘Europeanisation studies’, looking at how formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, shared beliefs and norms first defined and consolidated in the EU policy process are gradually incorporated in the logic