Paper Titles & Abstracts

The empirical evidence indicates that development policies are more effective when tailored at the levels closer to citizens, in cooperation with local decision-makers who take into account the territorial diversity of development potentials and conduct better calculation of policy costs and benefits for a particular community. At the same time, regional and local authorities (RLAs) today face a twofold challenge of delivering locally responsive policies in accordance with EU development goals (i.e. 'Europe 2020'). In doing this, they need to align their development strategies with European guidelines. For this reason, the involvement of RLAs in the decisions on the direction and scope of policies as well on the allocation of the financial resources is a necessary condition for growth. This paper identifies and evaluates several examples of multi-level governance (MLG) mechanisms operating in the institutional context of the EU which allow RLAs to participate in EU policy-making. It focuses on two functional categories of MLG, namely better regulation (i.e. impact assessment and subsidiarity control) and policy implementation (i.e. European grouping of territorial cooperation and the Covenant of Mayors). Through means of fact based reports, interviews, as well as desk research conducted at the Committee of the Regions, this paper determines the drivers and hindering factors of the regional and local participation in drafting and implementing EU policies with clear territorial impact. The findings lead to forming a set of recommendations addressed to regional, national and EU policy-makers in order to improve the effectiveness and coherence of their cooperation.