EU regional policy: Facing the final curtain?
Europe’s regional challenge is not one of ambition, but of delivery. The European Union (EU) has constructed an impressive policy architecture around competitiveness, resilience, security and the green and digital transitions. Yet the distance between these ambitions and socioeconomic realities across Europe’s regions is widening – increasingly with political and democratic consequences. EUrope’s policy responses today are shaping impacts that will be felt long into the future. This is no less the case for EU regional policy. The task of redesigning an effective response, fit for an era of structural change, is unquestionably difficult. But no serious effort to tackle the future of EU regional policy has even emerged. A new architecture - designed in the image of the Recovery and Resilience Facility – is destined to fail unless it is reshaped to engage the sub-national delivery community and respond to local realities. Before its abandonment, it is not too late to improve the policy’s design and confront the emerging delivery gap between the policy’s new rhetoric and its capacity to deliver.
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Alison Hunter is Senior Adviser on regional policy, innovation and industrial growth at the European Policy Centre.
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