Scaling beyond north and south: local agency of Finnish municipalities in European structural funds

ABSTRACTIncreasing regional differentiation and discontent in Europe have directed critical attention to European territorial cohesion policy and the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESI Fund) mechanism. There is wide literature investigating macro-level processes of regional differentiation and cohesion as well as the efficiency of multi-level governance in the implementation of the funding mechanism. This study contributes to the existing multidisciplinary literature on cohesion policy and structural funds by extending an understanding of the ESI Funds system to a local agency perspective with a specific focus on Finnish municipalities and the programme period 2014–2020, characterized by austerity policies, regional discontent and disagreement between the ESI programme regions. The examination offers a new understanding of local agents and beneficiaries’ differential access in the ESI Funds, showing that the agency of municipalities in the ESI Funds is simultaneously enabled and constrained by the multilevel Structural Funds programme’s areas of specialization, national regional policies, partnerships and the local environment. The findings indicate that generating inclusive and equal possibilities for all municipalities would necessitate more attention to the allocation of ESI Funds within the programme regions, not just between them.KEYWORDS: Regional policystructural fundsmunicipalitiesagencyregional development AcknowledgementsThe authors would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions. Thanks are also due to Foundation for Municipal Development (KAKS) for supporting the research (2020-2021) and Hanna-Maija Toivanen for producing the map. The authors are grateful to all municipal agents who devoted their time to participate in the study.Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.Notes1 The EURA database includes basic information about the ERDF and ESF projects (programme, amount of funding, main implementer, partners) that have been funded in each programming period and the role of different organizations in project activities, including lists of all ESI Funds projects implemented by the municipalities in the mainland Finland.Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by Foundation for Municipality Development (KAKS), Finland.