CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Demidov, Andrey Anatolievich |
|---|---|
| Title | Partnership Principle for Structural Funds in the New Member States. Understanding Contestation over the EU Requirements |
| Summary | The thesis engages in analysis of the logic and patterns behind the contestation process over the partnership principle for Structural Funds in four new member states – Poland, Hungary, Slovenia and Slovakia. It departs from a puzzling observation of actors, involved in the implementation of the partnership principle, strongly disagreeing with its current practice across all four countries and calling into question its existing format and advancing a variety of claims regarding possible reform of the practice. The thesis also departs from the academic puzzle of inability of existing scholarly accounts to explain the logic of contestation. It challenges the assumptions advanced by the literature on Europeanization, transposition and compliance, European civil society and partnerships in public policy as being able to capture only a small segment of complex reality of contestation and reduce it to either expression of actors’ diverse cultural origins or other ‘narrower’ properties such as interests, identities etc. To capture the logic of contestation over the partnership principle, the thesis draws on work of Antje Wiener and adapts the theoretical perspective of the theory of social construction of norms which views norms as intersubjectively constructed in the process of interactions, and which defines contestation as enactment of the structure of meaning-in-use. Meanings are seen as embedded in social practices. A new integrationist analytical framework is elaborated which views two social practices as potential reservoirs of meanings of partnership, namely, cultural, and professional backgrounds. Thus, the framework integrates diverse assumptions of exiting research literature. In empirical terms, in order to identify the logic of contestation as enactment of meanings shaped by either cultural or professional backgrounds an interpretive methodology was used. It prescribes reconstruction of meanings through immersion with the world of agents rather than pre-conceiving the sources of agents’ conceptualizations in advance. The major findings demonstrate that contrary to expectations of the existing literature, the logic of contestation over the partnership principle cannot be strictly reduced to either clash between cultural backgrounds of actors coming from different countries (cross-country divergence) or clash between diverse interests, identities or other properties of actors. It has been found that actors’ understandings of partnership are largely shaped by their common professional backgrounds and, thus, converge across countries but diverge across three groups of actors – state officials, civil society organizations and economic and social partners. The role of cultural backgrounds has been found as playing no, as in case of state officials and economic and social partners, or only some, as in case of civil society organizations, role in structuring actors’ interpretations of partnership. In other words, actors coming from the same group interpret partnership highly similarly. The findings contribute to and challenge existing scholarly discussions about Europeanization, implementation of the EU requirements and policies, and development of civil society actors in the CEE member states. The also highlight a new perspective on normative claims about European civil society and their empirical rootedness through a better understanding of contestation around the EU partnership. |
| Supervisor | Puetter, Uwe |
| Department | Public Policy PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/demidov_andrey-anatolievich.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2021, Central European University