Signorile, Jacopo
(2012)
The impact of regionalisation and europeanization on
regional development policies in Italy: policy
innovation and path dependence.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Scholars have proposed and investigated a view of social
relations as social networks and therefore the role of public policy
in creating new networks and new social and economic relations.
Are different incumbent institutional settings a relevant
variable to explain different regional policies responses to
Regionalization and Europeanization? I will address this question
with regard to the regional policy that was initiated in Italy in
1950 and that represented the country’s attempt to improve its
economic and geographic cohesion.
The hypothesis is that, within a devolution process, different
adaptation to regionalization and Europeanization pressures are
correlated to “path dependence” from incumbent institutional
settings. Specific attention is dedicated to the role of “paradigms”
in the processes analysed. This, in turn could generate different
devolution outcomes, in terms of discrepancy between formal and
effective outcomes.
Devolution is analysed in terms of institutional change and
policy (regional policy) change. Institutional change is
operationalized in terms of changes in polity and administrative
variables, and policy change is investigated through variables
representing formal (policy issues, i.e. design and responsibility)
and effective (financial, i.e. uses and sources) dynamics under the
two different pressures for change identified: regionalization and
Europeanization of regional policies.
The research proposed is pertinent and important in the
context of European integration where national policies have been
restructured due to, on the one hand, regionalization—i.e., the
transfer downward to the sub-national level—of policies formerly
handled at the national level and, on the other, “Europeanization”
or the transfer of policies upwards to the European level.
This thesis investigates the dynamics of the “paradigm and
policy shift” that took place within Italian regional policy between
1950 when the policy began and 1992 when the policy was
officially terminated due to a dual transfer of the policy upward to
the European level with the co-financing of cohesion policy and the
transfer downward to the role of the regions as management
authorities for the operational programmes that were responsible
for the bulk of Italian regional funds.
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