Chardas, Anastassios (2011) EU regional policy in Greece: state capacity and the domestic impact of Europe. Doctoral thesis (DPhil), University of Sussex.

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Abstract

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.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Schools and Departments:	School of Law, Politics and Sociology > Politics
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > DF History of Greece > DF701 Modern Greece J Political Science > JC Political theory. The state. Theories of the state > JC501 Purpose, functions, and relations of the state J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN5001 Greece
Depositing User:	Library Cataloguing
Date Deposited:	04 Oct 2011 09:39
Last Modified:	21 Aug 2015 12:33
URI:	http://sro.sussex.ac.uk/id/eprint/7419

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