2 Regional Variation in EU Identification in the Southern and Eastern Peripheries of Europe: Does Cohesion Policy Matter?

EU cohesion policy, supporting a variety of projects that support regional economic development and contribute to betterment of quality of life, can be considered as a tool that is contributing to the development of a ‘sense of community’ among the EU citizens and shaping the perceptions of the EU. By investing in projects across the European...

New indicators and indexes for benchmarking university-industry-government innovation in medical and life science clusters: Results from the European FP7 Regions of Knowledge HealthTIES project

Background: While the European Union is striving to become the 'Innovation Union', there remains a lack of quantifiable indicators to compare and benchmark regional innovation clusters. To address this issue, a HealthTIES (Healthcare, Technology and Innovation for Economic Success) consortium was funded by the European Union's Regions of...

Financial Instruments and Territorial Cohesion: (Revised) Inception Report

The main objective of this research activity is to provide territorial analysis on the impacts of European Structural and Investment Funds’ financial instruments in the 2007-2013 programming period and where data allows in the 2014-2020 programming period. The main outcome should be evidence on what the increasing shift to using financial...

Macro-regional Strategies, Cohesion Policy and Regional Cooperation in the European Union: Towards a Research Agenda

Since 2009, the European Union has developed strategies for the Baltic Sea, Danube, Adriatic-Ionian and Alpine macro-regions. These macro-regional strategies represent a new tool of European Union governance that seeks to combine the community’s territorial cooperation and cohesion policy repertoire with intergovernmental ‘regional...

Cities (and regions) within a city: Subnational representations and the creation of European imaginaries in Brussels

This article explores how sub-national institutions – representations from cities and regions – help create a European imaginary in Brussels. Political scientists and other scholars have noted the importance of these city and regional institutions, but have paid little attention to their physical form. Through a select set of case studies, this...