Socio-economic and Political Responses to Regional Polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe RegPol²

Transcription

1 Socio-economic and Political Responses to Regional Polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe RegPol² Project Description New patterns of regional disparities in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have led to the elaboration of the ITN RegPol² Socio-economic and Political Responses to Regional Polarisation in Central and Eastern Europe. These disparities emerged in the last decade but nevertheless remained largely unnoticed by both the public and scientists: a strong socioeconomic spatial polarisation between metropolised core regions and the remaining parts of the CEE countries. 1 Such disparities have not only become a striking feature of the current settlement system but in the face of the ongoing economic and financial crisis have fuelled concerns 2 about further polarisation and the peripheralisation of non-metropolitan regions. Patterns of regional polarisation, however, do not remain restricted to CEE, but rather can be found throughout the European Union, albeit at different degrees. As such, there is a high demand for professionals in academia, in planning authorities 3 and in the private sector with the necessary capacities for adequately dealing with spatial implications of these issues throughout the EU. This holds all the more true as balancing spatial development has been a major goal of the European Regional Policy (territorial cohesion). 4 Against this background, the training network draws together research and training capacities on socio-economic forms of regional polarisation, their wider impacts on society as well as the responses conveyed by social, economic and political actors. This includes research on practices of the production and reproduction of peripherality and centrality as well as the logics of responses at multiple scales. The Early Stage Researchers (ESR) and Experienced Researchers (ER) projects will deal with practice-oriented questions building on partners expertise and existing structures of research and training offered by academic and private sector participants. With its interdisciplinary layout and the spatial focus on CEE, the ITN also contributes to the emerging supra-disciplinary field of (comparative) Area Studies 5. In particular, the objectives of the network are to educate self-reflexive specialists in complex multi-agent decision making for regional policy under uncertain framework conditions; to train young researchers in better understanding regional polarisation and interrelated policymaking processes in different contexts and in communicating relevant information for decision making; to raise the employability of trained researchers due to better knowledge of different disciplinary and cultural planning and policy traditions in the EU. These objectives will be achieved through a joint research and training programme with individual, albeit strongly interconnected research projects in an interdisciplinary and intersectoral network, including specialists from academia and the private sector from seven 1 Stead, D.; Cotella, G. (eds.) (2011) Differential Europe: Domestic Actors and their Role in Shaping Spatial Planning Systems. Special issue of DISP The Planning Review, 186(3). 2 Barca, F. (2009) An agenda for a reformed cohesion policy. A place-based approach to meeting European Union challenges and expectations. DG REGIO. Online 3 Roose, A.; Raagmaa, G. (2011) Transforming spatial planning education in Estonia: concepts and implementation. In: WPSC2011 Book of Abstracts: 2011 World Planning Schools Congress, 4-8.July, Perth, Western Australia. (Toim.) Magin, Paul. Perth. 4 EU (ed) (2011): Territorial Agenda of the European Union 2020 Towards an Inclusive, Smart and Sustainable Europe of Diverse Regions. No place. 5 e.g., Bonnell, V.E.; Breslauer G. (2003) Soviet and Post-Soviet Area Studies. In: Szanton, D.L. (ed): The Politics of Knowledge: Area Studies and the Disciplines, ; Bates, R.H. (1997): Area Studies and the Discipline: A Useful Controversy? In: Political Science & Politics 30, pp

2 different European countries. The supervisors participating in this project represent eight scientific disciplines ranging from social and economic geography, politics, economics, international studies, history and planning to cartography and environmental sciences. All of them are used to working in multi-disciplinary environments and in multi-national contexts, and have participated in a joint research network project coordinated by the lead applicant. The partners share the aspiration of a social science based spatial research on polarisation issues in CEE and are used to work on the interface between research, education, policy making and private sector practice. By strongly including private sector participants, the project will focus on practical issues of polarisation. At the same time fellows will be prepared for professional activities in academia and the private sector by means of training them in relevant transferrable skills, scientific methods and techniques. State of the Art Despite of a long research tradition in geography, regional economics, political science and urban planning, and even though core-periphery relations have been studied at global, national, regional and urban levels, the research on regional polarisation processes up to now has been characterised by two major shortcomings: first, so far the main focus has been on quantitative, regionally limited studies. Only to a low extent they do raise issues of interdependencies with phenomena and institutional contexts outside of the respective regions, and by trend sparsely question regional socio-economic and policy responses. 6 Second, the social construction of coreperiphery relations has been reviewed only to a small degree, especially in the CEE context. 7 In addition, there is a clear need for a better knowledge about predominant discourses and super-ordinated paradigmatic Fig. 1: Increase of regional polarisation in GDP per capita, Nuts 3 regions 2000 and 2009 (authors calculation, data source: Eurostat) backgrounds of European, national and regional policies 8 as well as about the overlapping nature of core-periphery relations at regional, national, European and global levels. This is in particular true for CEE countries which underwent a rapid exposure to processes of globalisation and internationalisation after the political changes in the early 1990s and even more so after their accession to the EU. 9 As a result, already existent patterns of regional polarisation have experienced a strong 6 e.g., Lang, T. (2012) Shrinkage, Metropolization and Peripheralization in East Germany. In: European Planning Studies, 20:10, pp Ehrlich, K.; Kriszan, A.; Lang, T. (2012): Urban Development in Central and Eastern Europe Between Peripheralization and Centralization? In: disp 189 (2/2012), pp e.g. Lang, T. (2012) Conceptualising urban shrinkage in East Germany: understanding regional peripheralisation in the light of discursive forms of region building. In: Naumann, M.; Fischer-Tahir, A. (eds.): Peripherization: The Making of Spatial Dependencies and Social Injustice, Heidelberg, Springer. 9 Sellers, J.M. (2002) Governing from below: Urban regions and the global economy, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 2

3 intensification in recent years, 10 resulting in disproportionally high increases of regional disparities in the CEE countries compared to the EU 15 states. 11 Hence, CEE countries currently show strong evidence for three main spatial development characteristics: 12 First, there are profound differences in development between urban core regions and peripheral rural regions with the urban regions performing much better. Second, these countries demonstrate strong trends towards polarisation between their main metropolitan area (usually the national capital) and the rest of the country, and third, an eastwest-gradient can often be found within the countries with the western parts performing better than their eastern regions. As a consequence of these developments, today only one or a few strong economic engines stand out against a growing number of regions with low economic dynamics which become perceived as less attractive locations for people and business. Thereby the sharp increase of regional disparities stands against the closing development gap between old and new member states on the national level. 13 So far, also European regional policy programmes and the introduction of new forms of regional governance 14 did not help to achieve a more balanced spatial development and to distribute development impetus more evenly across CEE regions. The reason for this some authors see in historical experiences from the period of a centralised planned economy and a resulting sceptical perception of any public sector intervention, leading to a general turn towards neoliberal policies in CEE, and even furthering processes of socio-spatial polarisation. 15 The recent financial and economic crises have reinforced this process in leading decision makers to concentrate the development impetus on large cities, expecting the rest of the country to profit from core-periphery spill-overs but actually further exacerbating sociospatial polarisation. 16 Moreover, the formation of regional policies at the national level in CEE is still in its early stage 17 and there is too little known about the ways, regional policy responses and new forms of governance have emerged in CEE during the last years and how they interrelate with other forms of local and regional response: a research gap, the proposed network aims to close. RegPol² takes these research gaps relating to the intensifying regional polarisation in CEE as its starting point and defines three major research topics: (1) to understand the evolution, (re-)production and persistence of core-periphery relations in CEE, (2) to identify and compare policy responses to regional polarisation at different scales, and (3) to identify patterns of adaptation as well as strategies and potentials to overcome disparities. To tackle these topics, the network is organized in sub-teams working in strongly interconnected work packages (WP). Each WP draws together five to six individual projects of the recruited researchers jointly working on the three research topics. Three teams will work on the evolution, (re-)production and persistence of core-periphery relations (WP1), the 10 Gorzelak, G.; Goh, C. (eds.) (2010) Financial Crisis in Central and Eastern Europe - from Similarity to Diversity. Warsaw : Wydawnictwo Naukowe Scholar. 11 Artelaris, P., Kallioras, D., Petrakos, G. (2010): Regional inequalities and convergence clubs in the European Union New Member States. Department of Planning and Regional Development Discussion Paper Series, 16(3). pp.43-62; Dubois, A. et al. (2007) Regional Disparities and Cohesion: What Strategies for the Future? Report to the Directorate General Internal Policies of the Union. Stockholm Nagy, E.; Nagy, G. (2009) Changing spaces of knowledge-based business services in Hungary. Geographical Bulletin, 2, Finka, M. (2007) Territorial Cohesion Between Expectations, Disparities and Contradictions. In: Scholich, D. (Ed.): German Annual of Spatial Research and Policy Territorial Cohesion. Springer Verlag, Berlin. 14 Kaczmarek T. (ed) (2010) Functional and spatial development of cities in central Europe. 20 years of transformation. Questiones Geographicae, series B, Human Geography and Spatial Management, 28 B. 15 Bohle, D. (2006) Neoliberal Hegemony, Transnational Capital and the Terms of the EU's Eastward Expansion. In: Capital & Class 2006/30: pp ; Aligica, P.D.; Evans, A.J. (2009): The Neoliberal Revolution in Eastern Europe: Economic Ideas in the Transition from Communism (New Thinking in Political Economy), Edward Elgar Publishing, Cheltenham. 16 Weichhart, P. (2008) Neoliberalismus Meets Political Economy Politikversagen, Entdemokratisierung und die vergebliche Hoffnung auf Governance in der Zweiten Moderne. In: Bruckmeier, K.; Serbser, W.H. (eds.): Ethik und Umweltpolitik: Humanökologische Positionen und Perspektiven, pp Finka, M. (2011) Evolving Framework for Regional Development and Spatial Planning in the New Regions of the EU. In: Adams, N.; Cotella, G.; Nunes, R. (eds.): Territorial Development, Cohesion and Spatial Planning. Routledge, London. 3

4 governance of core-periphery relations (WP2) and on forms of socio-economic adaptation, strategies or potentials to overcome the disparities (WP3). WP1: Evolution, Reproduction and Persistence of Centrality and Peripherality. The evolution of core and peripheral regions does not follow any natural order. 18 Instead, centrality, peripherality and their interrelation are produced by social interaction, territorial mobility, political and economic decisions. 19 Although regional polarisation in this respect can change over time, the underlying structures are very persistent and tend to reproduce themselves. 20 This WP therefore considers how the perception of location (dis-)advantages, migration and demographic developments as well as particular policies, have contributed to the evolution, reproduction and persistence of centrality and peripherality and regional polarisation. Furthermore, it deals with the question of how core and peripheral areas are socially constructed in a multi-scalar way with overlapping local/regional, national, European and global forms of polarisation. The individual projects are as follows: ESR1 ( Territorial Mobility and socio-spatial polarisation in Romania ; host: UBB): Spatial perceptions and relations influence regional mobility while at the same time mobility constitutes and reproduces such perceptions and relations. Adopting a New Economic Geography framework, the project develops a multi-level perspective on migration processes, aiming at understanding the interdependencies between the spatial levels in more detail. This project uses the cases of Romania and Hungary and draws on applied expertise of GEO. ESR2 ( Fuzziness and softness in spatial patterns of regional policies ; host: STU): The ongoing integration processes in the EU, and in CEE in particular, have led to a fuzzification and a softening of existing territorial and functional borders when it comes to the formation of new regional policies (e.g. for metropolitan areas). The project aims at understanding the challenges resulting from this development in terms of new interpretations of peripherality, the creation of new spatial patterns (e.g. through clusters) and the adaptation of new institutional systems. The study studies regional examples in Slovakia, Czech Republic and Germany with support by MEPCO and IfL. ESR3 ( European and national regional and innovation policies reproducing peripheries? ; host: UT): Recent EU regional policy is often said to intensify regional polarisation (see above). Studying regional and innovation policies in the Baltic States, East Germany and the Slovak Republic, this project (supported by STU and IfL) will analyse whether regional policy has gone through Europeanisation (convergence with EU programmes and values) or retained own development paths (divergence) and whether this has had an impact on the efficiency of regional policy or helped reproducing peripherality in CEE. ESR4 ( Production of core-periphery relations through the social nexuses of economic agents settled in backward regions ; host: RCERS): The core-periphery relations are constantly shaped by social interactions between various agents reflecting their specific institutional environments. In this context, the project aims at understanding how the interactions of peripheral economic agents with core actors and their embeddedness into various non-local networks reflect, reproduce or counteract the peripherality of the region under study. To better understand how these processes are shaped by different national contexts, the project will focus on (eastern) Germany and Hungary. It will make use of existing research capacities of IQ and IfL. ESR5 ( Development perspectives of village communities in rural Estonia ; host: GEO): The project will be analysing peripheralisation processes in rural Estonia related to demographics, migration, employment opportunities and social infrastructure in order to 18 Lang, T. (2011) Regional development issues in Central and Eastern Europe: shifting research agendas from a focus on peripheries to peripheralisation? In: Eröss, A.; Karacsonyi, D. (eds.): Geography in Visegrad and Neighbour Countries, Budapest, Blowers, A.; Leroy, P. (1994) Power, politics and environmental inequality: A theoretical and empirical analysis of the process of 'peripheralisation'. In: Environmental Politics, 3, no. 2, pp Giddens, A. (1993) New Rules of Sociological Method. A positive critique of Interpretative Sociologies, Cambridge. 4

5 explore the development perspectives of village communities and opportunities for placebased policies. A community-based research approach supported by STU, enables an understanding of development processes that reflects day-to-day practices of people living in peripheral areas. ER1 ( The formation, reproduction and persistence of spatial social and economic polarisation ; host: RCERS): The 10 month ER-project will deepen theoretical perspectives to conduct research on the evolution, reproduction and persistence of centrality and peripherality. WP2: Governance of Core-Periphery Relations With a set of projects dealing with issues relating to the governance of core-periphery relations, WP2 investigates various forms of policy responses to regional polarisation and peripheralisation in CEE. Although, with the Territorial Agenda 2020, the EU has been following the concept of territorial cohesion since 2010, there has been very little research about policy responses to intensifying regional polarisation. Hence, WP2 analyses the emergence, institutionalisation and implementation of regional policies and various forms of public intervention applying concepts of governance and leadership. 21 A special focus is put on predominant discourses and paradigms of European, national and regional policies and their implications for innovative responses to social and economic polarisation in a regional context. 22 The work package includes the following projects: ESR6 ( Leadership and institutional change in peripheralised municipalities ; host: UT): Up to now little is known about the role public leaders play when it comes to the formation of local and regional policy responses to social and economic polarisation. Efficient policies to propose new forms of development always build on institutional change and certain adaptive capacities. 23 Project 6 will therefore analyse the impact of leadership to these forms of change. For doing so, the project also builds on MEPCO s manifold experiences with local and regional decision makers. ESR7 ( Path contingency and path innovation of regional policies in old and new economy locations ; host: MEPCO): The concept of path-contingency creates an opportunity to understand factors shaping regional policy responses in old and new economy locations and to identify the actions and practices that may alter the current path and set the regions on new development trajectories (path innovation). Based on comparative research with RCERS and UT in Czech Republic, Hungary and Estonia, the project will analyse regional development policies in both old and new economy locations, and study the potentials for path-innovation. ESR8 ( The role of policy paradigms for the governance of core-periphery relations in Germany and Romania ; host: IfL): The governance of core-periphery relations as well as the applied forms of policy intervention differ very much due to distinct normative development models and regional policy paradigms. With UBB, the project aims at exploring these distinct institutional environments, their origins and their relevance for regional policy making in Romania and Germany together with MEPCO and IfL ESR9 ( Multilevel governance for balanced development between core and peripheral spaces ; host: STU): Multilevel governance is seen as a promising approach for the development of European metropolitan areas. 24 However, up to now only little is known about the conditions which allow for successful cooperation between actors from the core region and the surrounding areas that aim at balancing out regional disparities. In this 21 Stoker, G. (1998) Governance as theory: five propositions. In: International Social Science Journal, Vol. 50, Issue 155, pp ; Sotarauta, M.; Horlings, L.; Liddle, J. (eds.) (2012) Leadership and Change in Sustainable Regional Development. Routledge, Abingdon. 22 Lang, T. (2011), op. cit. 23 North, D.C. (1990) Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 24 Heinelt, H.; Kübler, D. (eds.) (2005) Metropolitan Governance. Capacity, democracy and the dynamics of place. Routledge, London. 5

6 respect, project 9 will analyse innovative approaches in multilevel governance in the Slovak Republic, the Czech Republic and Germany. ER2 ( Theoretical foundations for transnational comparative research on governance of core-periphery relations ; host: UT): The term governance bears normative, theoretical and methodological meanings. This makes it necessary to entangle the different discourses around the concept of governance and propose sound theoretical foundations to improve transnational comparative research on the governance of core-periphery relations. WP3: Adaptation, Strategies and Potentials Although often receiving only marginal attention in national development strategies, nonmetropolitan, rural and peripheral areas are home to almost half of the European population, bear major spatial functions and in many cases play a decisive role in political, social and economic innovation processes. 25 Questioning current paradigms which regard the city as the major centre for social, economic and political innovation, WP3 perceives also peripheral areas as arenas within which future development perspectives arise. Against this background, innovative activities from civil society and businesses in peripheralised spatial settings shall be identified and evaluated in order to analyse their potential for new forms of regional development and bottom-up social, economic and policy change. The following projects are part of WP3: ESR10 ( Everyday practices of adaptation and resistance to peripheralisation at household scale ; host: RCERS): The project investigates changing everyday practices of adaptation and resistance to peripheralisation on a household-level in peripheralised areas in Hungary and Romania (with UBB). Key tasks are to analyse the households changing experiences and perceptions of socio-spatial polarisation, and to explore how they overcome existing core-periphery disparities ESR11 ( The role of social entrepreneurship and social business in regional development. ; host: IQ): The project identifies and analyses private sector responses to regional polarisation. Conducting case studies in peripheral areas of Germany and Hungary (with RCERS), the project looks for potentials offered through social or business innovation. In particular practices of social entrepreneurs in rural peripheries shall be addressed and their role in regional development evaluated. ESR12 ( The role of business innovation in the development of peripheral and backward regions in East Germany and peripheral Estonia ; host: IfL) investigates the role of business innovation in the development of peripheral and backward regions in East Germany and in Estonia outside of the Tallinn agglomeration with UT and GEO. The inclusion in global networks of information flows and production chains as well as the various ways to generate innovations are completely under-researched when it comes to entrepreneurial activities in peripheral regions, but these aspects bear the potential to promote change from an entrepreneurial bottom-up perspective. ESR13 ( The role of renewable energy in the development of peripheral areas in North- West Romania ; host: UBB): The basic idea of this project is to analyse the role of renewable energy policies in the adaptation to new core-periphery relations in Romania. Research will focus on the role of local potentials and resources and the ways policy makers aim at boosting the living standard and to promote local and regional development. The project includes an analysis of best practice examples identified with the help of IfL and RCERS in Germany and Hungary. ER3 ( Theoretical and conceptual thoughts around the ways of adaptation, formation of strategies and potentials for new developments ; host: IfL): The strength of local movements relates to variegated concepts such as leadership, structure-agency 25 McCarthy, J. (2005) Rural geography: multifunctional rural geographies - reactionary or radical? In: Progress in Human Geography 29,6, pp ; McCann, E.J. (2004) Urban Political Economy Beyond the 'Global City'. In: Urban Studies, Vol. 41, No. 12, pp

7 discourses, or institutional adaptation. With the project, theoretical and conceptual thoughts around the ways of adaptation, the formation of strategies and the potentials for new developments will be examined. 7