News
Ein halbes Jahr Territoriale Agenda - wegweisend
für die Raumentwicklungs-politik?
Präsentationen
der Fachkonferenz vom 11.12.2007
Forschungsabteilung 1
ProgreSDEC – Application of the ESDP on regional and local level / Interreg IIIC
An
international INTERREG IIIC project funded by the European Structural
Fund
Duration: July 2005 – June 2008
The Issue
The European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP, frz.: Schéma de Développement de l’Espace - SDEC), approved by the informal Council of Ministries for Spatial Planning in 1999, sets out common objectives and concepts for the future territorial development of the European Union. The overall ob-jective of balanced and sustainable development is divided further into three sub-aims:
- polycentric spatial development,
- parity of access to infrastructure and knowledge,
- wise management of natural and cultural heritage.
The ESDP serves as a policy framework for sectoral policies of the Community, in particular the EU’s structural funds, as well as for member state policies on national, regional and local level that have spatial impact. After six years of planning and programming activities carried out on different spatial levels throughout the territory of the European Union it had to be asked to what extent the ESDP has been considered at regional and local level and in which ways the ESDP as a general guideline gen-erated specific procedures and instruments for regional and local planning. ProgreSDEC therefore aimed to activate an exchange of experiences on this issue on local and regional level in four countries.
Interreg IIIC and its objective
With Interreg IIIC, interregional co-operation between regional and other public authorities across the entire EU territory and neighbouring countries were promoted. It allowed regions without joint borders to work together in common projects and develop networks of co-operation.
The co-operations under Interreg IIIC was meant to give access to experience of other actors involved in regional development policy and create synergies between "best practice" projects and the structural fund’s mainstream programmes. The overall aim was to improve the effectiveness of regional development policies and instruments through large-scale information exchange and sharing of experience (networks) in a structured way.
The Project
ProgreSDEC was organised as Regional Framework Organisation (RFO). This structure within Inter-reg IIIC allowed to distribute ERDF and regional funds to public sub-regional institutions (such as mu-nicipalities, territorial organisations, research institutes) in order to carry out projects together with similar partners of other EU regions.
The project aimed at activating an exchange of experiences and joint experimentations of methods and procedures for territorial planning and policies related to selected fields of the ESDP. Therefore, the project funded the co-operation of regional and local institutions that carried out innovative experiences (plans, territorial projects or programmes) in their territory and that wanted to share this experience with other European local institutions. An international call for these internal sub-projects was launched in spring 2006.
The transnational project group accompanied these activities by evaluating the progress and results of the internal projects with regard to horizontal co-operation (best-practice of regional co-operation on spatial planning issues) as well as vertical co-operation (contribution of local experiences to the ESDP). Complementary, the project group carried out analyses of the actual regional planning and policy structures with regard to the implementation of the ESDP.
The IRS participated as scientific advisor in this project. In the first project period the IRS supported the preparation of internal projects in the regions (call for projects, project selection). In the following periods the IRS guided the evaluation of vertical co-operation experiences of the internal projects. Complementary, the relevance of the ESDP for actual regional planning in the participating regions was analysed. As synthesis of the evaluation results related to internal co-operation projects and the regional analyses a final report on best-practice of regional co-operation on spatial planning issues was elaborated under co-ordination from the IRS.
The Partnership
The project brought together practitioners from regional and local planning authorities as well as researchers from four countries. The project group consisted of the following institutions:
- Regione Lazio - Direzione Regionale Territorio e Urbanistica (Latium Region - Department for Spa-tial and Urban Development, Rome, Italy) with the technical assistance of BIC Lazio (Business Innnovation Center Latium, Rome, Italy)
- Regione Piemonte - Direzione Pianificazione e Gestione Urbanistica (Piemont Region - Depart-ment for Planning and Urban Development, Turin, Italy)
- Regione Siciliana - Assessorato Territorio e Ambiente (Sicily Region - Department of Territorial Development and the Environment, Palermo, Italy)
- Perifereia Dytikis Makedonias (Western Macedonia Region, Kozani, Greece)
- Perifereia Kentriki Makedonias (Central Macedonia Region, Thessaloniki, Greece)
- Gobierno de Navarra - Departemento de Medio Ambiente (Navarra Region - Department of the Environment, Pamplona, Spain)
- Comunidad de Madrid - Consejeria de Medio Ambiente y Ordenacion del Territorio (Community of Madrid - Council of the Environment and Spatial Planning, Madrid, Spain)
- Leibniz-Institut für Regionalentwicklung und Strukturplanung, Erkner
- “Awareness” is a key factor of European issues for three reasons: Firstly, local resp. regional authorities become aware of their particularity in a European respect when reflecting current planning practices in transnational projects (“awareness of the European territorial and institutional environment”). Another, second type of awareness can be observed, when planners become acquainted with indicators of planning quality, i.e. measurements of objectives and their respective performance (“awareness of the quality of planning”). Thirdly, the term “awareness” relates to participation issues and, therefore, endogenous potential (“awareness of the regional or local roots”).
- European terms of integrative planning are defined differently depending on the local respectively regional background. This applies in particular to “polycentricity”, “landscape”, “access to infrastructure and knowledge”, “governance”, and “integration”. The interpretations found in sub-projects reveal a certain integrative understanding (a sort of “quality of planning”), but it can be shown as well that – when it comes to implementation – sectoral approaches seem to prevail because of their institutional strength.
- The issues of both “awareness” and “quality” can explain, why local and regional planners leave traditional government procedures aside and extend the range of institutional arrangements they are familiar with to governance models, which increase the variety of institutional frameworks at hand. This “territorial governance” takes account of the fact that European politics give and take influence to the regions. Therefore it is taking place in regions rather than single municipalities.
Results
The experience gained in the ProgreSDEC sub-projects provide material suitable to highlight three important aspects which are important for the mediation between the European spatial development policy on the one hand and regional and local planning practice on the other hand:
Concluding, territorial governance can be looked at as an institutional approach to develop integrative planning and development on a regional level in the context of territorial cohesion. This results in a process of cooperation, which requires the involvement of “all stakeholders of territorial development”, as it is stated in the TAEU (EU Ministers for Spatial Planning and Development 2007, § 5). If decision making turns out to be managed this way, the question arises how the relation between new fashioned governance and old fashioned government develops. This, in particular, accounts for cases, where the introduction of new approaches goes along with the change of planning levels (from local to regional), and should be answered in the research projects to come.
Publications
STEIN, Axel (2010, forthcoming): Territorial Cohesion in the Context of Interregional and Transnational Cooperation. In: European Spatial Research and Policy, Vol. 17, 1/2010
KRUPA, Jörn; KUNKEL, Kirsten; STEIN, Axel (2007): Ein halbes Jahr Territoriale Agenda - Wegweisend für die Raumentwicklungspolitik? Dokumentation der Fachkonferenz im Rahmen des Projektes ProgreSDEC vom 11.12.2007 in Potsdam
http://www.irs-net.de/forschung/forschungsabteilung-1/progresdec/ProgreSDEC_Dokumentation.pdf
Contact
Dr. Axel Stein
+49 (0) 3362 793 – 158
steina_at_irs-net.de
