The Impact of Eu Cohesion Policy on the Polish Sub-national Actors: Shallow or Deep Change?

This study draws on the concept of Europeanisation, understood as the domestic impact of EU policies, to investigate the influence of EU cohesion on the sub-national policy actors in Poland. The implementation of the Structural Funds (SF) in Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs) is credited for diffusion of norms and practices improving the capacity of the administrative actors involved and triggering changes in the patterns of governance. However, research to date showed that the adjustment to EU cohesion policy norms in CEECs was hampered by difficulties stemming from insufficient administrative capacity of the institutions involved and institutional legacies. In fact, on could expect that the pre-accession mode of EU policy rules transfer based on conditionality and external incentives for adjustment (rational-choice mechanism of change) would lead to hasty and superficial adjustment in the New Member States. This would result in ‘formal’ compliance with EU cohesion policy without fundamentally changing the pre-existing ‘ways of doing things,’ which in turn would be an obstacle for effective implementation of this policy. That said, one could also hypothesize that over time, once these countries become full members of the EU, sociological mechanisms of Europeanisation might come to the fore and favor internalization of EU policy rules through processes of social learning. There is a shortage of empirical studies investigating the mechanisms of post-accession adjustment to EU cohesion policy in CEECs, particularly at the regional and local levels. This study aims at bridging this research gap and testing the above hypotheses. Drawing on the empirical evidence from Poland focusing on the influence of EU cohesion policy in the areas of administrative capacity, strategic planning, and governance the paper shows that adjustment to the EU cohesion policy norms initially tends to be stimulated by cost/benefit calculation or constraint, which may involve ’shallow’ adjustment. However, the study also reveals that over time, provided that EU-imported norms are in line with the actors’ preferences, socialization and learning mechanisms become more prominent. Moreover, the paper demonstrates that the sub-national impact of EU cohesion policy remains uneven and differentiated depending on the actors’ preferences, attitudes and capacity.