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European Planning Studies
ISSN: 0965-4313 (Print) 1469-5944 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ceps20
Competing discourses of territorial development:
tensions between cities and regions as a result of
the new regionalism
Vratislav Havlík
To cite this article: Vratislav Havlík (2018) Competing discourses of territorial development:
tensions between cities and regions as a result of the new regionalism, European Planning Studies,
26:10, 1999-2014, DOI: 10.1080/09654313.2018.1504894
To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1504894
Published online: 29 Jul 2018.
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Competing discourses of territorial development: tensions
between cities and regions as a result of the new regionalism
Vratislav Havlík
Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Studies, Brno, Czech Republic
ABSTRACT
Competition between metropolitan areas and old regions is one of the
most visible results of the ‘new regionalism’ policy in the EU. The aim of
this paper is to explain the newly emerged tensions between the
regions and the cities within the EU in the context of the ‘new
regionalism’. The newly introduced ‘Integrated Territorial
Investments’ (ITI), a potentially powerful instrument of the cohesion
policy of the EU was presented as ‘a ﬂexible mechanism for
formulating integrated responses to diverse territorial needs’.
However, this ﬂexibility produced a competitive relationship between
cities and regions in their chase for money. Based on interviews with
sub-state oﬃcials, the study focuses on two countries: Czechia and
Slovakia. They are both major recipients of EU structural funds and
the ITI tool is being implemented in both of them, however with
diﬀerent outcomes. Three variables have been identiﬁed as major
factors causing the tensions: insuﬃcient administrative capacity,
political challenges and lack of shared understanding of priorities of
regional development among sub-state actors.
ARTICLE HISTORY
Received 26 October 2017
Revised 8 June 2018
Accepted 19 July 2018
KEYWORDS
EU cohesion policy; new
regionalism; sub-state
governance; 2014–2020
Introduction
One1
of the aspects of European integration in recent decades has been described as the
Europeanisation of territoriality. The list of actors to which nation states gradually cede
some of the powers they originally had continues to grow at an accelerating pace.
These are not just transfers of powers to the levels of the EU, regions or cities. The creation
of regional or supra-regional structures whose borders do not correspond to those of the
traditional administrative units of nation states provides a new challenge. These ‘non-standard
regional spaces’ (Deas & Lord, 2006) are usually discussed in the context of what has
been called the ‘new regionalism’ (Keating, 1998) – whether these are city-regions, metropolitan
regions or macro-regions.
The European Commission is an important initiator and supporter of these new territorial
forms (e.g. Allmendinger, Chilla, & Sielker, 2014; Luukkonen, 2015). However,
nation states diﬀer in their readiness to accept these new forms of governance. Whereas
some states acknowledge the new entities – typically those supported by EU funds, such
as the metropolitan regions – without major issues, others resist their implementation.
Thus tensions between old and new regions sometimes arise (Wheeler, 2002; Ziafati
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
CONTACT Vratislav Havlík vhavlik@fss.muni.cz Masaryk University, Faculty of Social Studies, Brno, Czech Republic
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES
2018, VOL. 26, NO. 10, 1999–2014
https://doi.org/10.1080/09654313.2018.1504894
Bafarasat, 2016), with traditional actors recalcitrant when asked to cede powers to the ‘new
regions’. As this paper will show, this is due to the varying readiness and experience of
local actors. It is evident that the European Commission has not been addressing the
issue suﬃciently and has unwittingly become a source of such tensions.
The new regionalism is introduced into a stable nation-state environment, where the
relationships between the various actors involved have long been established and are
often considered beyond question. In some cases these relationships are severely tested
by the challenge. However, not all countries necessarily experience the stress involved
in breaking the mould. There might be a consensus among the actors on the character
of the new regionalism and conﬂict is thus avoided; or a country might largely avoid
implementing a new regionalism, for instance, by failing to create the metropolitan
regions. The key question, therefore, is the following: Why do the relationships among
the actors of governance become tense in some countries but not in others?
Czechia and Slovakia are neighbouring countries that until 1992 were part of a single
state, Czechoslovakia. After partition in 1993 they naturally continued to be similar in
many respects. They had a shared history of administration; around the year 2000 they
created similar regional administrations, calling the new units regions (14 in Czechia
and 8 in Slovakia). Thus, neither country has much experience of decentralization in its
modern history, the central government playing a substantial role in implementing
regional policy. Furthermore, the two countries cooperate closely and often provide inspiration
to each other. One would expect, then, that they would choose similar ways of
implementing EU regional policy. However, since 2014 there has been an important diﬀerence
in their implementation of the integrated approach as promoted by the European
Commission. Whereas Czechia chose to create entirely new administrative units, Slovakia
tends to implement the integrated approach much more within the boundaries of its existing
administrative units.
The aim of this paper is twofold. It seeks ﬁrstly to describe a new type of dispute
between old and new regions and to identify in the literature potential sources of
tension and variables that may inﬂuence the diﬀerent degrees of tension occurring
across EU member states. Secondly, it aims to compare two similar cases: Czechia and Slovakia,
two countries that, despite having very similar traditions and administrative set-ups,
have reached substantially diﬀerent outcomes in terms of the new regionalism. The disputes
between the old and new regions described here are concerned with the distribution
of EU structural funds, and CEE countries as the main recipients of these funds seem to
provide suitable cases for a comparison. Why do these disputes arise? Both countries have
only a very short tradition of decentralization (see above) and the recently created (and
weak) regions, which implemented some of the structural funds in the 2007–2013
period, in Czechia came into conﬂict with the new regions (metropolitan areas) during
negotiations for the 2014–2020 period, with the new regions seeking to assume the
place of the older ones. Whereas in Czechia the urban agglomerations were able to
attract a substantial allocation of structural funds originally intended for the regions, in
Slovakia the regions were more successful. This paper seeks to understand these
diﬀerent evolutions.
The paper seeks to stimulate discussion about the diﬀerent forms in which new regionalism
is implemented. Speciﬁcally, it aims to make a contribution by identifying several
variables that inﬂuence this process.
2000 V. HAVLÍK
New regionalism as a source of tension among regional actors
The discussion about new regionalism (Deas & Lord, 2006; Keating, 1998) is not new, but
is one that is ongoing in the ﬁeld of the Europeanisation of territoriality. The focus of the
literature is on how new regional units come to be – units that are often inconsistent with a
state’s traditional units of administration – in other words, the ‘old regions’. In literature
these new units have been described as ‘new regions’ (Wheeler, 2002), ‘non-standard
regional spaces’ (Deas & Lord, 2006), ‘soft spaces’ (Allmendinger et al., 2014), ‘soft territories’
(Luukkonen, 2015), an ‘intermediate category of regions’ (Mendez, 2013) and ‘new
territorial governance arenas’ (Gualini, 2006). These works have largely examined new
regions within nation-state borders, especially the city regions and metropolitan areas
(Ziafati Bafarasat, 2016), but more recently also the macro-regions (Allmendinger et al.,
2014).
Although there are forms of new regionalism that are nation-state based (such as the
establishment of various metropolitan regions), these are a phenomenon largely directed
by the European Commission. In considering what motivates Brussels, one needs to bear
in mind that EU territorial cohesion objectives are not entirely compatible with nationstate
territoriality (Allmendinger et al., 2014, p. 2704). The European Commission has
long sought to improve competitiveness across the EU as a whole by supporting the establishment
of new territories of international signiﬁcance (Deas & Lord, 2006, p. 1848; see
also Luukkonen, 2015 etc.). Unlike in the past, however, the weakening of nation states is
not done today under the banner of regionalization. The steps taken by the European
Commission only push for the redistribution of such powers held by regional actors
that the nation states have not held for some time anyway. Thus, they are not so much
a redistribution of powers ‘upwards, downwards or outwards’ as ‘sideways’ (Deas &
Lord, 2006, p. 1863). In the debates about multi-level governance, the notion of ‘hollowing
out the nation state’ (e.g. Jessop, 2013) is a classic one, describing a situation where powers
are gradually taken away from the nation state and granted to either the supra-national or
the regional level. The phenomenon described in this paper is entirely diﬀerent, however.
Within the new regionalism, the state is a coordinating actor; but, in negotiations between
regional and local actors, as described in this paper, the state has nothing to lose. It was
clear from the outset that, in the process of allocating European subsidies, some of
them would be reserved for the sub-state level, as indeed they had been in the 2007–
2013 period. Thus, the state did not hope for the situation to be diﬀerent after 2014.
Hence, this is not a ‘hollowing out of the state’, but, at most, a ‘hollowing out of the region’.
The competitiveness that the European Commission hopes will appear thanks to new
regionalism can have negative externalities, however. The question is whether the creation
of ‘new regions’ may lead to conﬂicts with ‘old regions’. Deas and Lord (2006, p. 1862)
contend that
it might be expected, then, that conﬂict would be a feature of relations with established, conventionally-conﬁgured
territories that relate to standard administrative regions or the more
narrowly-drawn city regions. There is little evidence to suggest that this is the case.
Nonetheless, as metropolitan regions come into favour, there is no lack of speciﬁc cases of
dispute (e.g. in the UK – see Ziafati Bafarasat, 2016; Czechia – Havlík & Kuchyňková,
2017; Italy – Crivello & Staricco, 2017 and also Portugal and Slovenia – Nosek, 2017).
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 2001
But there is a lacuna in our present knowledge in that we do not know the exact reasons
that have led and continue to lead to disputes between old and new regions, and more
speciﬁcally between the various regional and local actors involved. Although general
reasons have been identiﬁed, such as globalization (Sykes & Shaw, 2008, p. 58) and unwillingness
on the part of old regions to share money from EU funds with new regions (Havlík
& Kuchyňková, 2017), it has not yet been explained why such conﬂicts arise in some
countries but not in others. The European Commission’s vague formulation of its integrated
approach make it likely that disputes will arise in any country that implements it
(which itself is typical of new regionalism), but in practice there are substantial differences
between countries that need explaining.
The literature does not oﬀer many variables that could unambiguously explain the disputes
between regional and local actors. Carlo Mendez (2013, p. 651) noted that the EU’s
territorial dimension draws on pre-existing experiences, by which he probably means
general experiences of EU institutions from the past. However, member states exhibit signiﬁcant
diﬀerences in the way they implement structural funds, and one may assume that
there would be diﬀerences in implementing the integrated approach precisely on the basis
of their varying experience (Van Der Zwet, Miller, & Gross, 2014). Van der Zwet at al.
have put together a catalogue of variables entitled ‘Key challenges for implementing territorial
approaches’. One of the challenges they noted was the ﬁeld of governance,
where ‘tensions’ may arise ‘between central departments and local administrations’
(Van Der Zwet et al., 2014, p. 35). Here it needs to be noted that the authors do not
explain why these disputes should necessarily involve central departments as counterparts
of local administrations, as such disputes might, in theory, also appear at other levels of
governance.
From the broad range of possible factors that could inﬂuence the integrated approach, it
makes sense to select only those factors that might become involved in conﬂicts between
regional and local actors. The authors (Van Der Zwet et al., 2014) do not speciﬁcally
denominate the factors connected with tensions between central government/regions
and local authorities, though these can be deduced from the nature of the challenges as
described by van der Zwet et al. The problem may derive from:
(1) insuﬃcient administrative capacity, including, according to the authors, a ‘lack of
experience in the project context’ or a ‘limited ability to draw from past lessons’;
(2) political challenges, where ‘political changes may lead to an alteration of strategic
direction’ (also supported e.g. by Keating, 2017; and by Havlík & Kuchyňková,
2017);2
or
(3) a situation where stakeholders fail to ‘reach a shared understanding of challenges’, i.e.
a situation where the key actors of a country’s regional policy have not reached at least
a minimal consensus as to the priorities of development. Such a consensus does not
come as a matter of course (also supported e.g. by Nosek, 2017; and by Havlík &
Kuchyňková, 2017).
As Štěpán Nosek’s (2017, p. 3) research has shown, territorial cohesion storylines may crucially
inﬂuence the outcome, and these storylines ‘diﬀer according to the type of regions
supported through regional policy (lagging regions, growth poles and rural regions)’.
Havlík and Kuchyňková’s study (2017) has demonstrated that the diﬀerent storylines of
2002 V. HAVLÍK
cities and regions played a crucial role in setting the agenda for the 2014–2020 programming
period in Czechia. Whereas regions argued that their aim was to achieve territorial
cohesion through support for less developed regions – among other measures – cities
largely sought to improve competitiveness through support for poles of growth. This
shows that negotiations about the character of the programming period can be fundamentally
impacted by the lack of a basic consensus among key actors concerning the paradigms
of development (see also e.g. Begg, 2010, etc.).
Of course, theoretically the question suggests itself: which actors besides the European
Commission inﬂuence the national discussion about the priorities of regional development
in a given country? One may ask what role has been played in this debate in both
examined countries by the metropolitan areas as actors possibly mobilizing diﬀerent or
even competing ideologies and preferences about how to manage territorial development.
The two cases investigated in this paper are largely speciﬁc, in that ‘soft spaces’ such as
metropolitan areas existed in neither country before 2014. Hence, the paper does not consider
metropolitan areas as active, negotiating actors which set the agenda, but rather as
dependent actors, the emergence of which was due to negotiations among cities,
regions and the central government. These negotiations, then, were inﬂuenced by
various variables studied in this paper. The relative newness of the discussion about
ITIs places certain limitations on this paper. The durability of the new regions, or ‘soft
spaces’, is a speciﬁc issue in the study of changing territoriality. According to Allmendinger
et al. (2014, p. 2705), ‘Some soft spaces might be very limited in time; others “harden”
towards strongly institutionalized forms; and others remain “soft” over a long time.’
Selecting cases from new EU member states is appropriate because these countries tend
to receive large amounts of EU funding and the phenomena under study are easily identiﬁed
and described. Yet on the other hand these phenomena can be highly unstable and
observations may lack long-term validity. This paper does not address the issue of new
region longevity and focuses purely on the point where disputes arise between old and
new regions.
A study of disagreements between regional and local actors cannot omit the central
authorities (the relevant ministries). As Deas and Lord (2006) have demonstrated, nation
states are not ‘robbed’ of powers in these disputes; yet it would be naive to assume that
they would stand aside. The ministries responsible continue to be crucial coordinating
actors which lead negotiations about the subsequent programming period and ultimately
sign the partnership agreement with the European Commission. A study of these disputes
must, therefore, also include the key ministries. In terms of the speciﬁc role
which ministries may play, one might largely expect the activities described under
points (b) and (c) (see proposed variables above). In other words, it is possible that
the government – as a coordinating and mediating actor – has certain political preferences
that imply support for concrete actors of regional development. Likewise, it is
likely that the government has a certain set of normative expectations as to how regional
development should proceed and what its priorities are. The government might then
seek to inject these expectations into the debate and into the negotiations with
regions and cities.
Last, the character of the ‘disputes’ or ‘tensions’ between regional actors needs noting.
These are naturally vague notions, which often tend to be employed rather intuitively in
the literature, without precisely describing the exact character of the disputes or the
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 2003
timeframe of their occurrence. When the two words are used in this article, it is always in
the context of describing a disagreement between local- and regional-level actors, at a
moment when the distribution of money from structural funds is being discussed.
Thus, this is a ‘conﬂict’ situation (Begg, 2010, p. 92) between actors of regional politics
as to the policy aims for the next period – i.e. which of the actors ought to play a more
substantial role in implementing the EU funds? This situation arises during the negotiation
phase, before the beginning of a seven-year programming period.
Integrated approach during the period 2014–2020 and the question of
Czech and Slovak readiness for the new regionalism
The tension described in the preceding section is probably due to a combination of two
phenomena, one European, the other national. On the one hand, the European Commission
creates a structure of incentives, though this is very broadly formulated and rather
vague. As I shall show, the Commission’s incentives are so vague that they oﬀer nation
states a practically unlimited range of possibilities in terms of implementation. On the
other hand, some nation states are very ingenious in interpreting EU legislation and
have widely diﬀering notions of implementation. As Joanna Krukowska and Marta Lackowska
(2017, p. 278) noted, ‘the member states react to this top-down inﬂuence by painting
these recommendations in their national colour of speciﬁc rules of implementation’.
Crucially, from the point of view of the European Commission, these ‘national colours’
are partially expected and partially unexpected.
In 2014, the European Commission unveiled its Integrated territorial investment (ITI)
instrument for the period 2014–2020, the primary purpose of which was to provide ‘a
ﬂexible mechanism for formulating integrated responses to diverse territorial needs,
without losing the thematic focus through which cohesion policy is linked to the Europe
2020 Strategy’. Since the beginning the Commission has emphasized that this was a
‘ﬂexible tool’. At a glance, the territorial applicability of ITI instruments is rather vague:
Any geographical area with particular territorial features can be the subject of an ITI, ranging
from speciﬁc urban neighbourhoods with multiple deprivations to the urban, metropolitan,
urban-rural, sub-regional, or inter-regional levels. An ITI can also deliver integrated actions
in detached geographical units with similar characteristics within a region (e.g. a network of
small or medium-sized cities). It is not compulsory for an ITI to cover the whole territory of
an administrative unit. (European Commission, 2014)
A broader space for ‘national colouring’ could hardly be imagined. Those member states
that decided to implement an ITI (it is not obligatory) were given the practical option of
spreading the implementation of the new instrument across a territory of any size. Still,
one can read in the Commission’s detailed manual (2015, p. 22) that among the considered
(yet non-binding) scenarios offered to member states, a metropolis, a subregion,
a district or twin cities are cited as options of areas where an ITI could be
implemented. The Commission (2014), therefore, seems to view this instrument as a
sub-regional or local one: ‘The possible delegation of the management of ITIs empowers
sub-regional actors (local/urban stakeholders) by ensuring their involvement and ownership
of programme preparation and implementation.’
This, however, contradicts the wording used in deﬁning territory, where the sentence ‘It
is not compulsory for an ITI to cover the whole territory of an administrative unit’ allows
2004 V. HAVLÍK
the nation state, when planning an ITI, to include, for example, an entire existing region in
its present boundaries. This did occur – in pre-2014 negotiations, existing Czech regions
sought to be allowed to implement the integrated approach/ITI – and the question naturally
arises as to what degree one is still dealing with an integrated approach in a ‘geographical
area’ as deﬁned by the Commission (as per above), if that area is a whole
region. Another issue arises when not one but all regions in a country decide to implement
ITIs, thus making no regions where the integrated approach is not implemented. In such a
situation we might well ask whether this is, in terms of development, still a ‘place-based
approach’ (Barca, 2009; EC, 2015), which is the key aim of EU regional policy for
2014–2020. Thus, the European Commission has placed in the hands of regional and
local actors an instrument whose implementation is very much dependent on the
speciﬁc experiences of their country and on the variables described above (see theoretical
section about the new regionalism).
The question of the readiness of regional and sub-regional actors might have posed a
crucial diﬃculty. From the outset in both countries, regions have been considered important
actors in regional development, but their options for inﬂuencing the set-up of regional
policy has been very limited. This is largely due to the fact that the regions were created
through a process of de-concentration rather than devolution. Although Czech and Slovak
regions have certain executive powers (the administration of regional roads, schools, hospitals,
culture and suchlike, and these powers are very similar in the two countries), many
other responsibilities are simply delegated to them from higher up. Further, it needs noting
that the process of decentralization was somewhat hurriedly undertaken in the two
countries around 2000, with the aim of fulﬁlling the expectations of the EU (Yoder
2007, p. 427). Thus, in both Czechia and Slovakia, the regions are still relatively recent
actors; their institutional culture is insuﬃcient, their negotiating skills are underdeveloped,
etc. Although the regions have existed in both countries for nearly two decades, they have
not been able to create a uniﬁed representation for themselves in Brussels. Only some of
them have representatives there; some were withdrawn over the last ten years for lack of
interest. This shows that the regions’ institutional embeddedness and governance culture
are lagging relatively and are far from reaching their true potential, as measured against
the paradiplomatic activities of western European regions.
Czech (e.g. Baun & Marek, 2007) as well as Slovak regions met with some success
when they negotiated the so-called ROPs (regional operational programmes) for the
2007–2013 period, thus achieving a higher degree of decentralization de facto in the distribution
of EU structural funds. Of key importance, however, is the fact that, due to
their comparatively small populations, the Czech and Slovak regions have not achieved
NUTSII status since the EU accession of their countries (most of them are NUTSIII
units). Thus, in both countries, artiﬁcial NUTSII-type units had to be created, typically
involving two regions each. These newly created institutions were, understandably,
remote from their citizens, and have not supported their identiﬁcation with the European
project. What is more, scandals were gradually uncovered at the NUTSII level,
especially in Czechia (Havlík, 2015). In conclusion, I note that in both countries decentralization
has been weakened by the fact that regional policy was largely implemented at
the level of the artiﬁcial NUTSII units, and actual regions have remained comparatively
weak actors. Thus, after 2014, the new regionalism was implemented into an arena with
relatively weak regional players.
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 2005
Methodology
As stated above, this paper has two aims: a theoretical one and a practical one. As for the
former: with reference to the existing extensive literature, it aims to provide a better
understanding of the disputes between regional and local actors that arise in the
context of integrated instruments vaguely formulated by the European Commission.
As for the latter: using a most-similar-cases design (MSSD, Della Porta, 2008), the
paper will test several variables that might create competitive tensions between regional
and local actors in the cases of Czechia and Slovakia. The two countries chosen are very
similar in many respects but diﬀerent in terms of the dependent variable. The choice of
cases according to a dependent variable is sometimes criticized, but is justiﬁed here
because the selection of ‘positive cases’ (Della Porta, 2008, p. 216–217) intends to
uncover and describe diﬀerent pathways leading to an outcome (Mahoney & Goertz,
2006). As described by Della Porta (2008, p. 215) a certain problem occurs when a situation
arises ‘where many variables may intervene, and we cannot control for their
inﬂuence’. This paper, therefore, seeks to describe in depth only two ideal3
and very
similar cases, thus seeking to avoid the inﬂuence of intervening variables. Naturally,
the very act of selecting only two cases limits to certain extent the possibility of generalizing
the results.
In comparing these two cases, this paper focuses on the potential roles of some of the
variables that were identiﬁed in the literature (Havlík & Kuchyňková, 2017; Nosek, 2017;
Van Der Zwet et al., 2014; etc.), p. 1) administrative capacity – the variable here is understood
as past experience with similar integrated projects and, resulting from that, the
ability to adapt to new challenges; 2) political challenges, where I asses to what extent
the distribution of EU funds was seen as a political topic and whether this fact played a
role in the ﬁnal set-up for implementing regional policy; and 3) shared understanding
of challenges, where I assess whether there is in the countries studied a long-term consensus
among the key stakeholders concerning the priorities of regional development, or
whether, by contrast, strong competing discourses can be identiﬁed.
The paper proceeds from strategic regional policy documents that describe the set-up of
regional policy for the period 2014–2020 in both countries. In order to obtain a more
detailed insight into the two countries, in-depth interviews with Czech and Slovak
oﬃcials at the local and regional levels were carried out in 2014–2017. These oﬃcials
were involved in the negotiations for the set-up in the current period, 2014–2020.
Seven Czech and four Slovak oﬃcials were asked in semi-structured interviews about
the process that led to the ITIs as currently implemented.4
Disputes between cities and regions: a comparison of the Czech and
Slovak cases
As suggested above, the literature oﬀers a limited number of variables that might lead
to a clash between sub-regional and regional actors. Drawing on existing literature and
the interviews that have been conducted, I chose three key variables that are likely to be
at the root of these disputes. These are: insuﬃcient administrative capacity, political
challenges and lack of shared understanding of challenges. The method used does
not allow for measuring the weight of the individual variables, and the analysis is
2006 V. HAVLÍK
therefore limited to a description of their occurrence and the circumstances of the variables’
inﬂuence.
A) Insuﬃcient administrative capacity
The criterion of administrative capacity is understood here more broadly than just an
actor’s ability to manage the inﬂux of the agenda with appropriate personnel and the technical
provision of their oﬃce. It also includes such aspects as a possible lack of experience
in the project context and the general experience the actor obtains in the complicated
negotiations over EU funds allocation. In other words, I am also interested in the positions
of the various regional and sub-regional actors in the system and their ability to respond to
challenges encountered in implementing EU regional policy.
A glance at the 2007–2013 programming period reveals that Czech cities obtained more
experience with the integrated approach than their Slovak counterparts. This is conﬁrmed
by some respondents (e.g. an interview at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development,
Slovakia, 30 June 2017) and comparative studies (e.g. Ministry of Regional Development,
2010, p. 78). Although Slovakia applied the integrated approach, the focus was
not on the development of whole cities but of some districts only. The priorities were
the revitalization of public spaces and the refurbishment of apartment blocks (Ministry
of Construction and Regional Development, 2012). During the same period, Czechia
chose to follow Integrated Urban Development Plans, which covered larger territories.
Some Czech cities, including Brno, had previously gained experience with the integrated
approach towards urban development thanks to such programmes as URBACT II (Joining
Forces project), and thus were better prepared when entering the new programming
period (Urbact, 2016). In terms of their overall experience with the integrated approach,
Czech cities were ahead of their Slovak counterparts (Euractiv.cz, 2009).
There are noticeable diﬀerences in the approaches chosen by large Czech and Slovak cities.
This might be due to the fact that Czechia has six cities with populations larger than 100,000,
whereas Slovakia has only two. Interviews conducted revealed that there are in both countries
strong organizations acting as umbrellas for municipalities (both called Associations of
Towns and Cities: SMO CR in Czechia and ZMOS in Slovakia) that traditionally have negotiated
with governments. However, large Czech cities have in the past circumvented their
SMO several times, as they felt under-represented in negotiations (based on the interviews,
City Hall of Brno, 22 July 2014 or City Hall of Ostrava, 8 July 2014).
This may be due to the fact that the areas covered by these associations is heterogeneous,
ranging from large cities to villages with populations in the hundreds. Because
of this, the umbrella organization cannot push for the best interests of only some of
their members, especially if that were to the detriment of other members. These associations
cannot promote only the growth poles, because that would go against the interests
of their other members (small municipalities) that often ﬁnd themselves in economically
less developed regions. Large Czech cities were aware of this and acted independently in
negotiations with the relevant ministry; whereas large Slovak cities continued to negotiate
through their ZMOS. But the Czech cities went even further and started to play an interesting
game, engaging intermediaries to lobby in the European Commission on their
behalf and against the interests of regions. They argued that growth poles needed
support in order to be able to act as economic powerhouses, and also pointed to corruption
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 2007
that previously occurred in regions during EU funds disbursement. The cities were so discreet
in their lobbying that regional negotiators were often unaware of it (based on the
interviews, i.e. City Hall of Brno, 22 July 2014 or City Hall of Ostrava, 8 July 2014).
Thus, a comparison shows that, unlike their Slovak counterparts, large Czech cities
embraced ITIs as their own projects and, in order to facilitate implementation, stood
apart from smaller municipalities and acted largely on their own account. They would
not be able to do this had they not had substantial previous experience of integrated programmes
and participation in international urban development projects.
B) Political challenges
Political challenges are diﬃcult to measure and we can only speculate about the overall
inﬂuence of this variable. However, they do need to be considered in order to obtain an
understanding of the key processes unfolding in the negotiation arena. In interviews with
representatives of Czech regions and cities, respondents agreed that party-political
ﬁghting played a role in deﬁning ITIs. According to these sources, there were, on the one
side, Czech regions almost entirely controlled by the Czech Social Democratic Party
(ČSSD) and, on the other side, the crucial Ministry of Regional Development, controlled
at key points of the negotiation process by ČSSD’s political rivals. Some respondents indicated
that the ANO party was unwilling to hand over the allocation of substantial sums to
ČSSD regional governors.5
The importance of political lobbying during negotiations in
Czechia is also conﬁrmed by a multi-country study on ITI implementation which includes
as one important variable ‘the ability of political lobbyists to intervene in setting the parameters
(weights and limits) – i.e. various actors express their wish to be included in
order to be eligible for funding’ (Binek et al., 2015, p. 66).6
In this respect the situation in
Slovakia was substantially diﬀerent. The respondents there witnessed no political ﬁghting,
which is probably due to the fact that the relevant ministry and regions were controlled
by the same party, SMER (during the crucial negotiation period, i.e. 2012–2014). Furthermore,
the debate about ITI implementation in Slovakia was from the outset drew strongly
on the preceding period, when regions had played an important role. Additionally, the government
asked both regions and cities to implement ITIs.
The political ﬁghting was also aﬀected by corruption that aﬀected regional operational
programmes in the past. Although most Central European countries have problems with
corruption, the Czech cases attracted particular media attention. The European Commission
repeatedly criticized the Czechs and pointed out their dysfunctional monitoring
system (Ďurďa, 2013). At the peak of the scandal, the governor of the Central Bohemia
region, David Rath, was arrested in 2012 and charged with misuse of EU subsidies.
During the 2007–2013 programming period several leading oﬃcials of multiple regional
operational programmes were prosecuted. With regions controlled by ČSSD, the opposition
ANO 2011 (later ANO), which subsequently received the crucial Ministry of Regional
Development as part of a national government coalition deal, made a point of criticizing
corruption within the various regional operational programmes (ANO, 2013).
C) Lack of shared understanding of challenges
The discussion about ITI implementation was diﬀerent in the two countries from the very
beginning. Whereas in Slovakia the necessity of continuity was highlighted – it was felt
2008 V. HAVLÍK
that support for regions granted in 2007–2013 should continue (Binek et al., 2015, p. 27) –
in Czechia the key actors involved in negotiations did not hesitate to attack each other
once the negotiation process started in earnest (ca. 2012–2013). The necessity for continuity
in Slovakia was caused by many variables; at the forefront was the fact that, according
to a report by the European Commission (2012a), the country faced a substantial regional
disparity, even at the end of the 2007–2013 period. Speciﬁcally, the Commission said:
‘Regional disparities in socio-economic development remain very important in Slovakia,
showing a signiﬁcant West–East and North–South division, with economic activity
being concentrated in the capital city region’. Of key importance was the Commission’s
criticism of how the Slovaks handled the various instruments of regional policy:
Slovakia should critically evaluate the experience and lessons learnt from the 2007–2013 programming
period, including the architecture of the implementation system, the concept of
growth poles, and the impact of the approach taken in relation to decreasing territorial disparities,
both in sectoral, regional and rural development programmes. (European Commission,
2012a, p. 18)
This was a largely ironic reference to the fact that during the period under review (2007–
2013) Slovakia had deﬁned for itself 82 innovation growth poles and 891 cohesion growth
poles (Ibid.) The criticism voiced by the Commission allows one to infer that Slovakia in
fact ignored the discourse of growth poles as promoted by the European Commission;
more speciﬁcally the country had translated these concepts into its own language in
such a way that virtually anything could be described as a ‘growth pole’. It is symptomatic
of Slovakia at the end of the 2007–2013 period, then, that in its ITI recommendations the
Commission did not clearly specify the level at which they ought to be implemented. First,
Slovakia was not in a position where it would have deﬁned a small group of growth poles;
second, any recommendation made by the Commission in this respect could create the
false impression that an urgent decrease of regional disparities was not the main priority.
The Commission’s communication with Czechia was carried out in an entirely diﬀerent
spirit. Somewhat critically, the Commission ﬁrst noted in its recommendations that ‘Any
proposal for the future system of the management of the Structural Funds in the Czech
Republic needs to be critically reviewed in view of the experience gained to date from
the functioning and problems of the current system.’ (European Commission, 2012b,
p. 18) Foremost among the recommendations was an invitation to show greater interest
in metropolitan areas:
Given the structure and size of the towns and cities, the urban dimension should, in the
Czech context, be better perceived in a broader sense, i.e. in terms of urban agglomerations
as a functional area for socio-economic development or in terms of cities and their socioeconomic
hinterland, including urban-rural links (Ibid.).
The recommendations do not provide entirely concrete guidelines on ITI implementation
for either Czechia or Slovakia; they do however, set some boundaries. The recommendations
can be read as suggesting that Slovakia should do something with its signiﬁcant
regional disparity, whereas Czechia should focus on urban agglomeration growth poles.
According to the interviews conducted, the discussion in Slovakia about the relative positions
of regions and cities was calm, as is indeed shown by the result of the negotiations,
with both regions and cities implementing ITIs. In Czechia, by contrast, the cities, encouraged
by the Commission, took the initiative and sought to set the terms of discussions as a
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 2009
dichotomy between growth poles and economically less developed regions. Of course, it
cannot be claimed unambiguously that the Commission alone played a key role in the
two countries’ understanding of the development challenges. Rather, a broad spectrum
of actors – including the government, regions and municipalities – participated in the
‘shared understanding of challenges’. Thus, this variable understandably overlaps with
the other two variables. The factors that matter in setting up priorities for regional development
include the previous experience of the actors, their administrative capacities and
their negotiating power overall, as well as the degree to which regional development has
become a political issue in the country. Of the two cases studied here, Czechia and Slovakia,
the Czech cities had sufﬁcient experience and administrative capacity, as well as a
powerful political ally, and these circumstances probably led to their successful push for
change in the priorities of regional development.
Conclusion
The introduction of metropolitan areas in both Czechia and Slovakia did not lead to a disruption
of hierarchical arrangements or a change of power relationships. However, one
can observe indirect eﬀects, in the form of the relative weakening of regions (especially
in Czechia), which obtain less money from structural funds to distribute. What happened,
then, is that the actual manoeuvring space available to the ‘old’ regions has shrunk. In
other words, it can be noted that the new regionalism was in this case simply co-opted
by the system and formal power relations have remained intact: the regions continue to
be actors in regional policy, but their real position has been weakened by the lowerthan-expected
allocation of EU funds.
The aims of a paper examining variables that might cause clashes between sub-regional
and regional actors are naturally limited. Although three important variables have been
identiﬁed, it is evident that if other countries were investigated some further factors
might be uncovered. The paper does not measure the inﬂuence of the factors examined
(indeed, that is not really possible), but it oﬀers an interesting shift in the discussion concerned
with the relationships among actors involved in multi-level governance.
The paper’s main aim is to stimulate the discussion of the various forms that new
regionalism takes and especially the reasons for them. My comparative study has
shown that the most important variable is most likely the administrative capacity of
new regions. However, this must be understood to encompass not just the current administrative
ability to manage tasks, but also past experience with similar projects. If a new
region crosses the notional threshold of ‘suﬃcient capacity’, it stands a chance of becoming
a competitor for the old regions. This conclusion of my empirical comparison is in agreement
with ﬁndings in the literature, though previous studies have only examined disputes
between central and local bodies.
The two further variables tested proved of importance. It has been shown that the
overall understanding of a country’s development priorities is crucial for potential disputes
between sub-regional and regional actors. The notion of such priorities can be understood
as a discourse formed and maintained by several actors. National government is certainly
one of them; through its strategic documents it sets the long-term priorities of regional
policy, which may be convenient to some actors and not to others. However, the European
Commission also plays a substantial role, in that its evaluating reports may signiﬁcantly
2010 V. HAVLÍK
aﬀect the distribution of power and empower certain actors at the expense of others, as
shown in the cases studied. Whereas when discussing Czechia the Commission tended
to dedicate more attention to metropolitan areas acting as growth poles (thus these metropolitan
areas are new regions de facto), in Slovakia it emphasized the need to remove
regional disparities. Though the countries concerned could object to such recommendations
and establish diﬀerent priorities (as indeed Czech regions attempted), the recommendations
clearly did play a role.
Crucially, the clashes between new and old regions should also be understood as a political
challenge. In view of the other two factors (administrative capacity and shared
understanding of challenges), this is the most speculative variable, as it appeared only
in the verbal utterances of my respondents. There is nevertheless an interesting ﬁnding:
whereas in Slovakia, controlled throughout the period studied (ca. 2012–2014) at the
crucial levels of governance by one party, there was no politically-motivated dispute
between old and new regions, several respondents in Czechia agreed independently of
each other that the crucial ministry (the Ministry of Regional Development) preferred
to support cities’ metropolitan areas rather than to grant substantial ﬁnancial allocation
to regions controlled by their main political competitor. It is important to note that all
the factors examined acted concurrently, as a cocktail. The success of Czech cities was
undoubtedly based on their previous experience with the integrated approach and their
strong lobbying capacity, yet these would not necessarily be so eﬃcient had the Regional
Development Ministry and the European Commission not sided with them; this then
created an overall shift in the understanding of development priorities. In examining
clashes between old and new regions, the various independent variables should therefore
not be discussed separately.
Further case or comparative studies, by examining new data, will make our knowledge
of the factors inﬂuencing conﬂicts among actors at the lowest levels of multi-level governance
more precise, thus making a welcome contribution to the continuing debate. Speciﬁcally,
the opportunity presents itself to include in the comparison other countries where
there has been a dispute over the distribution of EU funds (ﬁrst of all, Italy). Likewise,
it might be fruitful to update the study of Czechia and Slovakia in a few years, with the
aim of ascertaining whether the initial disagreements have altered the long-term relationships
among the regional and sub-regional actors involved in the process of governance.
Notes
1. This work was supported by the Grant Agency of the Masaryk University under the project
Europe in Changing International Environment IV (MUNI/A/0834/2017).
2. Although this factor has been described for the example of Greece, it may also arise in other
contexts, wherever any new political team brings new emphases into policy making, thus
changing existing approaches to regional policy.
3. Ideal in the sense that they are new member states that receive a high allocation of ﬁnance per
capita from EU funds and the phenomenon under discussion (a dispute among actors concerned
with the set-up for a future period) might therefore resonate much more strongly than
in ‘old’ member countries.
4. The interviews were based on the following set of questions, which were speciﬁed further: 1)
To what extent was ITI implementation in your country a conﬂict issue? 2) Have you noticed
a dispute between regional and local actors concerning ITI implementation? 3) What role did
the government/ministries play in the discussion of ITI? 4) Have you noticed an attempt on
EUROPEAN PLANNING STUDIES 2011
the part of cities or regions to circumvent the nation state and negotiate a better position for
themselves in Brussels?
5. The rivalry between ČSSD and ANO continues despite the fact that in 2014-2017 the parties
have been coalition partners in the Czech national government.
6. This was also shown in early 2014, when a caretaker government (one not enjoying parliament’s
conﬁdence) led by Jiří Rusnok approved Olomouc urban agglomeration’s participation
in an ITI only at its last meeting.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank two anonymous referees for their insightful comments. I would also like to
thank my colleague, Petra Kuchyňková, for helping me to carry out one of the interviews.
Disclosure statement
No potential conﬂict of interest was reported by the author.
Funding
This work was supported by Grant Agency of the Masaryk University [Grant Number MUNI/A/
0834/2017].
ORCID
Vratislav Havlík http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2701-7171
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