MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNMENT OF COHESION POLICY - OPPORTUNITIES AND LESSONS LEARNED

Vit Sumpela ()

ERSA conference papers from European Regional Science Association

Abstract: MULTI-LEVEL GOVERNMENT OF COHESION POLICY - OPPORTUNITIES AND LESSONS LEARNED JEL code – R50 Keywords: Multilevel government, Cohesion policy, regional policy, management and control system, trust Cohesion policy is regarded as one of the most complex systems of redistribution of public interventions. Financial intervention in the complex cross-cutting issues is implemented through a very complex administrative system by individual projects. Such a complex system is generally defined first by the EC rules, then the individual Member States in its legislative and institutional environment creates an environment for management and administration of this intervention that eventually could be attributed to a particular feature of the intervention of the relevant institutions, which form the implementation environment of current Member State. European Commission assumes that the institutional and legislative environment of a Member State is at a sufficient level to ensure proper financial and administrative process flows. Calculating the fact, that the legislative framework, enables realization of public procurement and others, ensuring controls of the system in order to identify problematic processes, there is a need to divide powers and responsibility for deciding vertically on appropriate level and transfer the responsibility for implementing the rules in order to comply with all legal framework of the Community and the Member State. In such a multi-level government, however, occurs more than one issue that may complicate the overall management system. The basic concept that it should be borne in mind is a trust. Within this complex system is necessary to build and maintain the long-term trust between institutions and the trust in the individual rules and their interpretation. With the trust in the system, of course, relates control issue. The control mechanisms, mainly control procedures should be set in the very beginning due to establishing of the basic principles of implementation and should not be changed during period markedly. The result of such behaving in the system is a high error rate and loss of confidence in setting the management and control system. It causes also a significant impact on the administrative burden and its cost. In all these areas there is need to handle with the appropriate level responsible approach to the competent officials that could be able to decide on their respective cases and should not remove the decision responsibility to a higher level in order to get rid of personal responsibility. All of these problematic areas of multi-level government need to be discussed on a basis of practical examples. Consequently, it is necessary to find approaches that will strengthen overall trust in the system and will enable focus on the achievement of policy objectives, not only to ensure administrative accuracy of financial flows. That should go in particular.

Date: 2012-10
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