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EU regional policy in Greece: state capacity and the domestic impact of Europe

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posted on 2023-06-07, 16:13 authored by Anastassios Chardas
The purpose of the thesis is to analyse the implementation of the European Union’s Regional Policy (EURP) in Greece and to clarify and explain the contextual factors that resulted in the ineffective deployment of the policy. It adopts a comparative political economy approach and employs largely qualitative methods in order to collect empirical material. It develops a conceptual framework based on the theories of state and administrative capacity on the one hand and Europeanisation and implementation on the other. Empirically, the aim is to substantiate the difficulties that the country faced in the implementation of the EURP. Moreover, the aim is to explain these difficulties with reference to the patterns of interaction developed within the institutional network that was created as part of the EURP as well as the domestic authorities that supported the implementation of the policy. The Greek state has suffered from a series of weaknesses that impacted upon its internal administrative as well as its interactive capacities in the field of developmental policy. The recent Europeanisation of the country’s polity has partially addressed these issues. Nonetheless, the fieldwork research on the implementation of the EURP reveals that these difficulties persisted and impacted upon the patterns of the implementation of the policy. Significant delays, implementation difficulties and reorganisations of the programmes were the main characteristics of all the programming periods. Furthermore, the introduction of the institutional network that would manage and monitor the implementation of the programmes has become embedded in the previously existing patterns of state-society interaction. The thesis has two main original contributions. The first consists of the empirical findings and particularly the detailed analysis of the patterns of implementation of the third Community Support Framework (CSF). Moreover, it offers the first detailed study of the separate administrative network that was established in the third CSF and attempts to depict its impact upon the patterns of institutional interactions that were established in previous programming periods. Secondly, the conceptual framework that it develops in order to account for the patterns of implementation of the EURP in Greece has not been employed for similar purposes. It postulates that it is important to account for the mediating influence that domestic political and administrative institutional arrangements play in the implementation of the EURP.

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File Version

  • Published version

Pages

283.0

Department affiliated with

  • Politics Theses

Qualification level

  • doctoral

Qualification name

  • dphil

Language

  • eng

Institution

University of Sussex

Full text available

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2011-10-04

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