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Negotiating the regulation of the Structural Funds: Italian actors in EU regional policy-making

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 January 2016

Marco Brunazzo
Affiliation:
Centro Interdipartimentale di Ricerche sul Cambiamento Politico (CIRCAP), Università di Siena, Via Mattioli 10, 53100 Siena. E-mail: brunazzo@soc.unitn.it.
Simona Piattoni
Affiliation:
Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerce Sociale, Università di Trento, via Verdi 26, 38100 Trento. E-mail: piattoni@soc.unitn.it.

Summary

The role of Italy in the reform process of the regulations concerning EU regional policy has traditionally been weak. Since 1998, however, Italian actors in Brussels started to play an increasingly more central role. Looking at the 1998 Regulation, we analyse the internal and external factors that explain this improved performance and conclude that this change might lead to an even more active and creative role being adopted by Italian institutional actors in the current negotiations which will lead to the reform of the regulation of the Structural Funds for 2007–13.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

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References

Notes

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40. Interviews with DPS officials, December 2002.Google Scholar

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43. Of the six objectives of the programming period 1993–99, three of them concern regions: Objective 1 (for the regions whose development is lagging behind), Objective 2 (for areas in industrial decline) and Objective 5b (for the development of rural areas).Google Scholar

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46. At the end of the meeting, Monti is reported to have commented that he had been ‘struck by the depth with which the Conferenza follows these issues … There has not been in the past a strong enough attention to Structural Funds, while now there seems to be a great interest both on the part of the central government and on the part of the regions’ (Ansa, , 11 March 1998).Google Scholar

47. See several reports Agence Europe (among others, those of 2 March 1998, 10 June 1998 and 9 February 1999).Google Scholar