Catálogo de publicaciones - libros

Increasing regional inequalities characterise the post-socialist period of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Rural villages in CEE are among the biggest losers of transition to the European Union. This chapter aims to understand how community-owned projects could empower local communities to influence peripheralisation dynamics. Specifically, the authors look at two mayor-led local development projects implemented through national and EU funding. Their research reveals that both projects are important for local communities and could generate benefits for the inhabitants. At the same time, the projects face bureaucratic burdens and lack wide participatory engagement. Based on their findings the authors formulate a series of public policy recommendations meant to foster local engagement, offer more flexibility to local actors and increase the level of support for similar projects.

Regional development strategies assign a key function to firm innovation. However, actors in peripheral regions face certain limitations that expose their innovation efforts to additional complexities. Placed within this field of tension, this chapter looks at the practices and strategies firms from South Estonia and the Erzgebirgskreis (Germany) adopt to organise their innovation activities. Insights from illustrations of two specific cases (innovation projects) are related to observations of wider empirical material. Findings suggest that firms adopt a dual strategy to facilitate innovation and to overcome the limitations of regional environments. This strategy comprises strategically mobilising ties to external actors and maintaining/expanding internal capacities. The chapter makes a contribution towards better understanding firm innovation that occurs in peripheral regions and, thus, contributes to their theorisation.

As one response to peripheralisation, agency-based concepts like place leadership and image making have received increasing attention in research on regional polarisation. Based on fieldwork in Estonian rural areas between 2015 and 2017, this chapter sheds light on unexpected challenges faced by local leaders applying these solutions and researchers trying to make sense of them. While place leadership and image making can play a crucial role in fighting regional polarisation, it is shown that they also create new problems of idealisation and responsibilisation in structurally disadvantaged rural areas. Through a discussion of the limits of these response strategies, the chapter reflects upon the complexity that practitioners and researchers experience when acting in these places, which also questions the recent focus on agency prevalent in research on regional polarisation.

The goal of this penultimate chapter is to shed light on the conceptual value of the book. Growing social polarisation and economic inequalities unfolding in new forms across various places have brought about academic and policy debates on the meanings of ‘development’, the ways its dimensions (economic, social, cultural, political) are interrelated, and on how macro-structural changes are entangled with local and regional processes as well as institutional and social contexts. This chapter adds to this discussion by providing a better understanding of five interrelated topics: (1) the regional policy paradox in the European Union, (2) historical legacies leading to administrative centralisation trends in Eastern Europe, (3) globalisation and regional industrial restructuring causing further polarisation, (4) the mechanisms that bring about inequalities, and (5) the production of inequalities through social practices and discourses. Based on these key topics, the chapter argues for more agency-centred research in peripheral contexts, which focuses on how actors, organisations and institutions shape the development of currently peripheralised places.

The dynamics of polarisation and peripheralisation are addressed in this chapter at different administrative levels, starting with the EU institutions and ending with local communities. This chapter looks at the exact way policies approach and tackle these dynamics at each administrative level. Relying on materials from the previous chapters, the authors outline a series of important policy shortcomings at every level (EU, national and local). Based on these shortages, the authors suggest five guiding points that address cohesion policy, local involvement in national policy-making processes, national responsibility to build supportive infrastructure, social capital at the local level and policy-making input at the local level. Along with these five points, the authors formulate a series of public policy initiatives as tools for positive change.