Suchergebnisse

In 2020, the EU established the "Recovery and Resilience Facility" (RRF), which aims at promoting its economic, social, and territorial cohesion. This development has had a significant impact on the institutional architecture of cohesion policy, which is widely viewed as the main "EU solidarity tool". The goal of this paper is to map the institutional configuration of "old" and "new" funding programs devoted to the promotion of cohesion and solidarity in Europe through the lenses of public policy analysis and historical institutionalism. It is argued that despite its impressive redistributive impact in territorial terms, the new Facility does not represent a break from the past when it comes to the quality of its solidarity content. On top of that, by adding RRF in a "cohesion policy space" burdened with old and new policy goals and means and lacking a clear territorial and social focus, EU actors have further undermined both the coherence and the solidarity impact of "old" cohesion policy.

The article studies the impact of the revised Lisbon Strategy -and the National Reform Programmes (NRPs) in particular- on the EU policy coordination of Greece. It is argued that the structures and processes established for the formulation and monitoring of the NRPs reflect some deep-rooted characteristics of the Greek system of governance, namely centralism, politicization, informality and reliance on actors. It is also found that the demise of this policy network was caused not by domestic factors or developments, but by the insistence of Greece's EU partners to fuse the implementation of the Greek NRP with the execution of the 2010 economic adjustment programme. The introduction of this process of coercive-direct Europeanization in Greece (as well as in Ireland and Portugal) signals, inter alia, the emergence of a two-speed "Europe 2020". On the other hand, the new reform coordination process in Greece relies on preexisting structures and processes that closely follow traditional patterns.