Journal
INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF ADMINISTRATIVE SCIENCES
Volume 78, Issue 4, Pages 642-664Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0020852312455577
Keywords
bonding; bridging; Cohesion Policy; European Union; linking social capital; multi-level governance; procedural rules; regional policy; structural funds
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This article focuses on the policy process stemming from European cohesion policy at the regional level and at its programming stage (which precedes the implementation phase). It aims to explain how the formally introduced EU 'partnership' principles and rules work in practice in different political environments. The article argues that externally introduced procedural decision rules have different impacts on effective policymaking processes. In particular, we suggest that the patterns of social capital linkages carried by the actors involved produce different regional policy networks, even though the existing formal rules are similar. Relying on social network analysis as its main methodological tool, the article presents empirical evidence drawn from two similar Spanish regions, identifies the characteristics of the actors' social capital and compares the structures of the policy networks dealing with the programming tasks in the two regions. Our findings suggest that the structures differ according to the amount of linking social capital displayed by the actors involved in the policy networks. We discuss in detail our exploratory hypothesis, considering also other possible variables that might account for these variations.
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