Empowerment via delegation? The administrative capacity-building potential of Cohesion Policy urban development strategies

ABSTRACT

The study examines the implementation of urban development strategies in Scotland, UK, and the Veneto Region of Italy and fills an important gap in the knowledge about the capacity-building potential of such strategies. Following a principal-agent approach, the investigation shows that narrow delegation models incentivize compliance, are less conducive to capacity-building and reinforce an administrative capacity paradox. By contributing an original framework for the study of delegation models, a fine-grained understanding of administrative capacity that acknowledges the importance of agency for the success of capacity-building initiatives and policy recommendations for the period 2021–27, the research will be of interest to scholars and practitioners alike.

KEYWORDS:

• administrative capacity
• government quality
• regions and cities
• European Union Cohesion Policy
• sustainable urban development

JEL:

• R58
• H83

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We thank all interviewees for their time and valuable insights, and the participants in the Special Session 15 III: ‘Empowering Actors in Local Dimensions of Cohesion Policy’ at the Regional Studies Association (RSA) Annual Conference (Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 4–7 June 2019) and in the RSA Cohesion Policy Research Network Conference ‘Building Administrative Capacities’ (Delft, the Netherlands, 21–22 November 2019) for their valuable feedback on early drafts of this paper. Our grateful thanks also to the three anonymous referees: we found their comments and suggestions extremely insightful, constructive and helpful.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. See https://www.sgi-network.org/2020/; and http://info.worldbank.org/governance/wgi/.

2. We developed our assumptions focusing on Scotland and Veneto, which are meso-level authorities. Nevertheless, where applicable, for national operational programmes the same assumption would apply to national authorities, namely ministries or agencies.

3. Internal document obtained during fieldwork, dated 16 October 2018.

4. Under the automatic decommitment rule, a portion of the budgetary commitment is automatically decommitted by the European Commission if it remains unused or if no payment application has been received by the end of the third year following the year of the budgetary commitment (see https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/index.cfm/en/funding/financial-management/).

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by the CARIPARO Foundation [grant number 2018.0517]. Open Access was supported by the University of Padua’s Department of Political Science, Law and International Studies.