THE ARKLETON TRUST
Report of the 1999 Arkleton Trust Seminar
The Implementation of Agenda 2000 in Rural Areas of Eastern and Western Europe
Peter Willis and John Bryden
November 1999
THE ARKLETON TRUST
Report of the 1999 Arkleton Trust Seminar
The Implementation of Agenda 2000 in Rural Areas of Eastern and Western Europe
Peter Willis and John Bryden
November 1999
CONTENTS
Publication Details / About the Authors
| Title: | The Implementation of Agenda 2000 in Rural Areas of Eastern and Western Europe. Report of the 1999 Arkleton Trust Seminar, Douneside, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. February 1999 |
| Authors: | Peter Willis and John Bryden |
| Publisher: | The Arkleton Trust, Enstone, Oxon OX7 4HH |
| Date: | November 1999 |
| ISBN: | 0-90 6724-45-7 |
| Price: | £6.00, including postage within Europe |
Copyright in this report belongs to The Arkleton Trust. Permission is given to bone fide researchers and practitioners to quote material from the report without further reference to the copyright holder, provided always that acknowledgement of the original source is given, including any relevant secondary sources cited therein.
The Trust's publications, and further information about its activities, can be
obtained from:
The Administrator, The Arkleton Trust, Enstone, Oxon OX7 4HH
Tel: +44 (0)1608 677255 Fax: +44 (0)1608 677276
e-mail: arkleton@enstoneuk.demon.co.uk
website: www.enstoneuk.demon.co.uk/arkleton/
During 1999 the Trust's Research arm, The Arkleton Trust (Research) Ltd, combined
with existing
research activity in rural development at the University of Aberdeen to form the
Arkleton Centre
for Rural Development Research. The Centre, under the joint directorship of John
Bryden and
Mark Shucksmith, aims to be a centre of excellence in Rural Development Research.
Further
information on the work of this centre can be obtained from:
The Arkleton Centre, St Mary's, King's College, Aberdeen AB24 3UF
Tel: +44 (0)1224 273 901 Fax: +44 (0)1224 273 902
e-mail: m.p.paterson@abdn.ac.uk
website: www.abdn.ac.uk/arkleton
Dr Peter Willis
Peter Willis recently completed a Masters degree in Rural and Regional Resources
Planning
(European Rural Development) at the University of Aberdeen, supervised by John
Bryden.
Professor John Bryden
John has been part-time Programme Director of the Arkleton Trust since 1981, and is
currently
joint Director of The Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research at the
University of
Aberdeen, Scotland. He is also joint Director of the Masters Course in Rural and
Regional
Resources Planning and Co-ordinator of the European Rural Development stream in that
course.
The Trust would like to thank the following for their essential contribution to the organisation, funding, running, and reporting of the 1999 Seminar and the prior study tour:-
Peter Baumann, for his excellent chairmanship
Caroline Higgs for her care and organisational skills as domestic bursar and travel
agent!
Carmen Higgins and Fergus Cooney for a splendid evening of Scottish traditional
music and song
TAIEX for their support for E European participants
The MacRobert Trusts for allowing us the use of their splendid conference facilities
at Douneside
The Walter Higgs Trust for their support, without which our annual seminars would not
be possible
Peter Willis for agreeing to be rapporteur and for largely putting together this
report
All of the 22 participants at the seminar.
John Bryden who, as Programme Director of the Trust, organised the seminar and study
tour, and
prepared the issues paper for it
The following also agreed to meet those participants (mainly from the CEECs) who joined the two-day study tour organised by the Trust before the seminar. We would like to thank them for their time and contribution.
Jim Stephens, Scottish Office AEFD, Edinburgh
Dr J S Black , Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Inverness
Frank Gaskell, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Inverness
David Smillie, Highlands and Islands Enterprise, Inverness
Lorna Gregson MacLeod, Highlands and Islands Partnership, Inverness
Graham Strachan, Highland Council, Inverness
Sandy Renfrew, Crofters Commission, Inverness
Alan Dobie, Scottish Natural Heritage, Inverness
Roy Anderson, Moray Badenoch & Strathspey LEADER Group, Strathspey
Elspeth Grant, LEADER Community Agent, Boat of Garten
Stuart Fulton, Cairngorms Partnership, Grantown on Spey
Almudena Buciega Arevalo UDERVAL, Departamento de Geografia, Universidad de
Valencia, Spain
Tel: (+34) 96 386 4237, Fax: (+34) 96 386 4234
e-mail: almudena.buciega@uv.es
Peter Baumann Danish Market Management & Intervention Board, Copenhagen,
Denmark
Tel: (+45) 33 92 7000, Fax: (+45) 33 15 4340
e-mail: peb@eud.dk
Prof John Bryden The Arkleton Centre for Rural Development Research, St
Mary's, King's College, Aberdeen
Tel: +44 (0)1224 272 352, Fax: +44 (0) 1224 273 902
e-mail: jbryden@abdn.ac.uk
Laurent Van Depoele Director, DG VI-Agriculture, VI/F1 - Rural Development 1,
European Commission, Brussels,
Belgium
Tel: (+32) 2 295 6178, Fax: (+32) 2 299 4935
e-mail: van-depoele@dg6.cec.be
Prof Sophia Efstratoglou Dept of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural
University of Athens, Athens, Greece
Tel: (+301) 529 4771, Fax: (+301) 529 4764
e-mail: sefst@auadec.aua.gr
István Fésüs Head of Agro-Environment Management Division,
Ministry of Agriculture, Budapest, Hungary
Tel: (+36) 1 301 4539, Fax: (+36) 1 301 4644
Frank Gaskell Head of European Unit, Highlands and Islands Enterprise,
Inverness. Scotland
Tel: +44 (0) 1463 234171, Fax: +44 (0) 1463 24469
e-mail: HIE.GENERAL@hient.co.uk
Caroline Higgsc/o The Arkleton Trust, Oxford OX7 4HH
Tel: +44 (0) 1608 677255
e-mail: arkleton@enstoneuk.demon.co.uk
Luka Juvancic Biotechnical Faculty, Chair for Agricultural Policy, Groblje 3,
1230 Domzale, Slovenia
Fax: (+386) 61 721 005
e-mail: luka.juvancic@bfro.uni-lj.si
Toomas Kevvai Vice Chancellor, Min of Agriculture, Tallinn, Estonia
Tel: (+372) 625 6209, Fax: (+372) 625 6200
e-mail: tkevvai@agri.ee
Katalin KolosyAEIDL, Brussels, Belgium
Tel: (+32) 2 736 49 60, Fax: (+32) 2 736 04 34
e-mail: info@aeidl.be
Iwona Lisztwan Foundation of Assistance Programmes in Agriculture (FAPA), Min
of Agriculture, Warsaw, Poland
Tel: (+48) 22 623 1357, Fax: (+48) 22 628 9387
e-mail: iwona@fapa.com.pl
Ph Dr Iveta Námerová VÚEPP, Bratislava, Slovak
Republic
Tel: (+421) 7 53413857/direct line: 58243275, Fax: (+421) 7 53417950
e-mail: namerova@vuepp.sk
Maria Ostoja-OstaszewskaFDPA, Warsaw, Poland
Tel: (+48) 22 622 5255, Fax: (+48) 22 622 5245
e-mail: maria@fdpa.org.pl
Mariana Pavalan Director, DG for Rural Developments and Programmes, SAPARD
Unit, Ministry of Agriculture &
Food, Bucharest, Romania
Tel/Fax: (+40) 1 3 110378
e-mail: pavalanm@isp.acorp.ro
Prof Lars Olof Persson NORDREGIO, Nordic Centre for Special Development, Box
1658, SE-111.86, Sweden
Tel: +46 8 4635434
e-mail: larsolof.persson@nordregio.a.se
Jan Polley The Scottish Executive Rural Affairs Department, Pentland House, 47
Robbs Lane, Edinburgh EH14 1TY
Tel: +44 (0) 131 244 6363, Fax: +44 (0) 131 244 6012
e-mail: jan.polley@scotland.gov.uk
Dr Elena Saraceno CRES SRL, via Giuliani 5, 33100 Udine, Italy
Tel: (+39) 432 470098, Fax: (+39) 432 470138
e-mail: saraceno_cres@compuserve.com
Dr Sally Shortall Sociology Department, Queens University, Northern
Ireland
Tel: 01232 3359 70, Fax: 01232 320668
e-mail: S.Shortall@qub.ac.uk
Dr Nigel Swain Centre for Central and E European Studies, University of
Liverpool, England
Tel: (+44) (0) 151 794 2422, Fax: (+44) (0) 151 794 2366
e-mail: swainnj@liverpool.ac.uk
Dr Peter Willisc/o The Arkleton Centre, St Mary's, King's College, Aberdeen
AB24 3UF
e-mail: pwillis@faculty.ed.umuc.edu
Mireille Winkelmolen Avalon, Wommels, The Netherlands
Tel: (+31) 515 33 1955, Fax: (+31) 515 33 1980
e-mail: avalon@merlink.nl
Agenda 2000 was published by the European Commission in July 1997. In March 1998 the Commission presented its detailed proposals for discussion over the next year, and the draft Rural Development Regulation appeared in March 19991. These were to come into force from January 2000, so by the time the seminar began, planning the processes and procedures for implementing them was well in hand. Past experience suggested that the planning process varies between Member States, and within acceding Central and Eastern European states (hereafter CEECs), albeit within certain known guidelines. In some cases, and especially in CEECs, the procedures and processes were new.
So to bring together some of the key actors involved in the formative stages of implementation, giving them the opportunity to compare approaches and learn from one another's experience, could be useful to all parties. This was the main reason for choosing as the topic of the 1999 seminar the principles and practice of implementing Agenda 2000.
A second reason followed from the 1998 seminar. This looked at rural development in Europe from an international perspective, with a view both to Eastern enlargement and to the forthcoming Millennium round of trade negotiations under the WTO. The 1999 seminar could complement that international perspective by looking at the local implications of Agenda 2000, both for present and for future Eastern members of the EU: how both Member and Acceding States were going about its implementation and what might be the consequences of going about it in different ways.
Accordingly, the objectives of the seminar were:
Proceedings
The participants in the seminar represented the range of interests in Agenda 2000 and
its
implementation. Present were policy-makers and planners from eight Member States and
six
Acceding States, together with officials from the European Commission,
administrators, members
of non-government organisations, and academics from diverse parts of Europe.
The first day was devoted mainly to a presentation of the Commission's attitudes and
procedures,
followed by a general discussion of how these looked when approached from the East
and from the
West. In the light of this discussion, five issues were chosen as the focus for
subsequent sessions:
The seminar concluded with a round-table discussion of what had been learnt.
At the end of the century Europe may, without too much licence, be likened to a ménage à trois comprising present members of the European Union, prospective members and the Commission. Each brings their traditional principles and current priorities, fixed commitments and areas of negotiability. All have reservations about the past, are none too comfortable with the present, and have misgivings about the future. In the course of the seminar many aspects of this imbroglio found expression, one way or another, in what proved knowable and what was not, what could be resolved and what could not, and how the resulting tension and uncertainty were dealt with. For the participants these encounters in passing served the pursuit of the third objective as much as the direct exchanges did the pursuit of the first two.
This report
This report is written for non-participants and participants alike. It is not a
transcript but a
synthesis: it draws together the exchanges of all sessions in quest of coherence
beyond the limited
concerns of the individual topics. The aim is to bring out the logical flow of
argument, which may
not always be apparent in the thick of a spontaneously evolving debate nor emerge too
clearly in
retrospect.
The report seeks to provide both a distillation of diverse individual contributions and a convenient overview of a collective debate. In this way it hopes to give better access to the substance of what was discussed, both to those who were not present and to those who were. All would then be provided with a statement of the issues and a range of responses to these issues that gave food for thought, whether to recall or to consider for the first time, and to agree with or to dispute. Such reflection could then be brought to bear in subsequent reflection on the fortune or fate of Agenda 2000, the way it was implemented in the event and what happened in consequence of implementing it that way. It should not however be imagined that there was consensus among the participants on every or even any issue - nor that they would all be happy with what is written here2.
Various reasons may be suggested for this. One has to do with institutional attitudes of government, expressed and entrenched in departmental structures and administrative procedures, and in turn mirrored in the organisation of lobby groups. Agriculture has traditionally been dealt with via sectoral policies, rural development via territorial policies. Such orthogonal orientations of policy means that to integrate them calls for some gymnastic talent and much practice, not to mention persistence.
A second reason, in part a consequence of the first, is that the various people whose activities and interests are the subjects and objects of policy tend to see themselves in competition with one another. Budgetary allocations then take on the character of a zero-sum game: what is given to one is at the expense of the other. This issue of whom policy is to serve has received classic expression in the question whether policy is "pour l'agriculture ou pour la coiffure?". Thus farmers who see themselves necessarily rooted in the land are said to ask in righteous indignation why 'their' money should be taken away and given to others who just happen to work in rural areas, such as hairdressers.
These farmers may receive the reply that as things stand money used for rural development outside Objective 1 areas is additional to what is provided under normal payment via EAGGF guarantees. But this could incite them or their lobbyists to further musing: if they can prevent money being diverted into soft schemes to do with rural development, there would be more hard cash for them. Thus may rural development become a pawn in negotiations between ministers of agriculture, farmers' lobbyists and the European Commission. When negotiations are conducted in such a climate, the case for and objections to 'multisectoriality' tend to fall by the wayside or succumb to collateral damage from infighting over financing arrangements.
A third reason for uneasy relations is their different time horizons. Agricultural policy must always attend to next year's or indeed next week's prices and the effect they may have on farmers with fragile confidence and volatile temperaments. Rural development policy, by contrast, needs to look to the next decade or beyond and ask what will sustain faith if not strengthen conviction over that length of time. Agricultural circumstances can change overnight: in the morning farmers may wake to milk quotas and a ban on beef exports. Rural development never occurs overnight; it is always a long-term business.
As farmers tend to see things, better roads and prettier villages, not to mention conveniently local hairdressers, are all very well but do not look much like a substitute for price-support policies, not in the short-term anyway. What they would like to hear from the advocates of rural development is how soon will rural development projects benefit their bank balances and their families. Only then will they or their lobbyists listen to arguments for loosening their grip on market policies.
There is another side to this question of time horizons. Rapid change in agriculture can be devastating for the socio-economic well-being of rural areas. Gradual change, such as decrease in agricultural employment associated with long-term irreversible technological change, may be manageable. In some areas it can be compensated for by rural development programmes that foster increased employment in other sectors, such as manufacturing and services (perhaps initiated by, or otherwise benefiting, farm families themselves), and by taking advantage of other aspects of technological change, for example teleworking. Sudden reversals in agricultural fortunes, be they caused by singular events such as BSE in the UK or intentionally abrupt changes in policy, such as 'shock therapy' or 'structural adjustment' programmes in CEECs calculated to change attitudes and expectations, present problems of arresting or ameliorating rural decline rather than of promoting rural 'development' in the conventional positive sense.
Precipitate rural emigration, for example, prompted by such agricultural reversals, may undermine rural development programmes that could lessen the impact of such agricultural change because the selective departure of the people able to leave quickly might reduce disproportionately the developmental capacity that may have been built up slowly over preceding eras of gradual emigration.
For the CEEC's rural development is a new concept but, as in many existing member States of the EU, it is being administered there by Ministries of Agriculture. In Hungary (unusually) both agriculture and regional development are the concern of a single Ministry, although so far this does not seem to have worked very well in terms of producing integrated thinking and action. In both Estonia and Poland, there are sub-departments for agriculture and for rural development, each with a Minister. Responding to the pre-accession programme SAPARD (Special Accession Programme for Agriculture and Rural Development) has thus posed some challenges to existing structures of Government.
These and other considerations that might be adduced should be set in the wider context of Agenda 2000. The earlier agenda that gave rise to the Single European Act of 1987 and the Treaty of European Union in 1992 recognised, though not immediately and perhaps not without reluctance, that European unity has a necessary complement in diversity, and that diversity encompasses not just comparative advantage but competitive disadvantage too. It is reasonable for the European Union, both as it exists and after enlargement, to aspire as the subtitle to Agenda 2000 has it, to become a "stronger and wider union". It is not reasonable for it to aspire to become uniform. However 'common' the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) might come to be under whatever reforms, and however rural areas may conceivably be 'developed', the objective should not be to make the European Union everywhere the 'same'. Diversity is of its essence, not an accidental property that will pass with time. It may, even for economists, sometimes constitute an asset to be exploited, not a liability to be eliminated.
That this is especially so of Europe's rural areas was one of the fundamental realisations that informed predecessors to Agenda 2000, such as the 1985 Green Paper Perspectives for the Common Agricultural Policy, the Communication on The Future of Rural Society of 1988, and subsequently influenced the reform of the Structural Funds in 1988 and of the CAP in 1992 (MacSharry reforms). Rural diversity has various geographical dimensions: of climate (from the frost-free Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle); of soils (fertility, drainage, fragility), of topography, (plains, mountains, coasts and islands), of location (proximity to major urban and industrial areas, to the coast and to the centre of the continent), of accessibility (transport distances and costs, centrality and peripherality), and of culture and history. But in the Europe that Agenda 2000 addresses, Europe after 1999, diversity has an inescapable political dimension as well.
This dimension is salient enough among existing Members and Applicants taken individually: contrast the politics of the UK and France. Between Members as a group and Applicants as a group it amounts to a divide; contrast agriculture and rural development in the UK and in Poland. To establish a viable (not just "stronger and wider) unity in diversity in Europe at the end of the twentieth century will require more than just setting an agenda - as indeed it did at the end of the nineteenth, or any previous century for that matter. This should be borne in mind when considering relations between agricultural policy and rural development policy. Their difficult state is but one particular instance of the larger difficulty of finding unity in European diversity that is not lessened by referring to it, as in Agenda 2000, as a "challenge".
Contemplating such a challenge may lead some to conclude there should be two distinct policies, with separate funding. Then rural development policies could be pursued for long enough to show benefits to farmers, and the charge of farmers that "you are taking our money away from us" would first be suspended and then quietly dropped. But others would reply that such a vision of separate domains is a dream born of administrative tidy-mindedness rather than waking attention to the way the rural world is and is becoming. For on closer examination, the sharp outlines of both sides tend to dissolve and the division between them becomes harder to draw as a single straight line.
This is in part, though not just, a consequence of ambiguities stemming from the way the domains are conceived and the words used to describe them. What is understood by the word 'rural' varies notoriously, even where near equivalents exist in different languages; what counts as 'agricultural' in bureaucratic definitions in German, Italian, French and English do not always include the same things. This adds to the difficulties of statisticians trying to compile compatible figures and the irritation of researchers hoping to discover interesting correlations among them, but it is not just a matter of convenience to be resolved by sensible convention. There is an abiding element of conceptual disagreement. What is 'rural' in the Netherlands or Denmark is essentially, not just conventionally, different from what is rural in Scotland or Finland.
Further, the way words that are available in different languages and states are used tends to change over time as the debate over policy and the policies themselves evolve. The word 'agriculture' may no longer have strictly sectoral connotations in all contexts; in English, with variants in England and Scotland and Wales, 'hill farmers' are nowadays not just farmers who happen to farm on rounded elevations of land. They are also, and in some quarters now primarily, thought of as the bastions of a threatened cultural tradition in aesthetically pleasing landscapes with little chance of alternative employment. So too with the word 'development'. The addition of 'sustainable' as a qualifier initially promised clarification but subsequently threatened to confuse just what is envisaged as the desired end state: to sustain (keep going) the development (the process of improvement), or to develop (bring into being) sustainability (a stable state or self-correcting equilibrium)? Adding the word 'rural' compounds the difficulty: should it go before or after the word 'sustainable'?
This confusion or evolution of language is not just gratuitous; in part at least it reflects genuine conceptual complexity. Nowadays the Commission likes to speak of "a multi-functional agriculture" and refers to a model of agriculture that is distinctively 'European':
The fundamental difference between the European model and that of our major competitors lies in the multifunctional nature of Europe's agriculture and the part it plays in the economy and the environment, in society and in preserving the landscape, whence the need to maintain farming throughout Europe and to safeguard farmers' incomes.
The Commission may well have various interests in promoting such a model. In collecting many things into a single breathless sentence it cultivates the impression that some policy circles can be squared. Having it adopted by all parties may smooth otherwise turbulent negotiations with refractory partners by conveniently blurring distinctions and obscuring differences between rival positions. Those who hold them may then be persuaded that the gap between them is narrower than they thought, become less sure of the righteousness of their cause and so be more easily assuaged in their disappointment at settling for less than what they hoped for at the start.
Be all that as it may, agriculture may nonetheless have many functions. The question then becomes how many of these does a particular agricultural policy support and how well does it serve them.
A market policy might seek to promote competitiveness of the agricultural sector, where competitiveness means 'do not need export subsidies to sell on the international market'. In the Europe of the EU15 and the CEEC10, competitive agriculture of that kind seems feasible mainly in certain areas and for certain commodity products: say, with varying degrees of confidence, wheat and barley in lowlands of East Anglia and Normandy or the plains of Hungary and Romania; pork in Denmark and Poland; beef in Scotland and Hungary; citrus fruit, wine and olive oil in some parts of the Mediterranean states, timber products in Sweden and Finland.
In other areas, such as the mountainous regions of Spain or Greece or Slovakia, a market policy may not often promote competitiveness because farmers in these areas are not and will never be 'efficient' producers of tradable commodities except in specialised niches. But in mountainous areas, some ways of farming and some kinds of farmer, whose cattle and sheep cannot support them and their own family let alone compete with those on the plain or across the ocean, may be good (rather than 'efficient') producers of highly differentiated products offering real or perceived advantages to consumers, and providers or presenters (rather than 'producers') of recreational amenity and services to visiting tourists. They could thereby help conserve the natural environment, to the benefit of visitors and local inhabitants alike, not to mention non-human ones. By the life-long (not just year-round rather than seasonal) presence of them and their families, they could help maintain the viability of services to local communities and through their local knowledge help preserve these communities and the local cultural heritage. To expect a market policy to support farmers on the plains and on the mountains equally well asks a lot both of what economic theory should promise and what policy can claim to deliver. That a policy may operate effectively to promote rural well-being, using farmers as the conduit of distribution in some areas but not others, indicates that agriculture has its limitations as a development vehicle. Given these limitations, it may not always be the most appropriate one, at all times as well as all places.
Such considerations prompt a series of general questions. Why articulate rural policy through farms and farmers? Are they the only available conduit of funds, the sole vehicle of development in rural areas? If not, are they the most efficient? What is the proper measure of efficiency here; indeed is efficiency, however measured, the most appropriate criterion? Is 'effectiveness' as relevant as 'value for money'? Whatever may have been the case in the past, to which Agenda 2000 is responding, what of the future, the rural world for which it is an 'agenda' and so will have a part in creating?
The influence over policy that agricultural lobby groups such as COPA and the NFU, with their organisational structure carefully attuned to the sectoral administrative structure of national governments, have long been able to exercise goes some way to explain why it has been articulated that way in the past and is so at present. But it does not thereby provide a justification as to why it should continue to be so in the future, especially given the changing circumstances acknowledged by Agenda 2000 and which it claims to address.
An alternative to a mono-sectoral market policy, albeit still based on a multi-functional agriculture, is a multi-sectoral rural development policy. This would indeed attend to agriculture, but as one element among others. Such a policy would address the range of people in rural areas directly not just indirectly; it would concern itself with other entrepreneurs (perhaps even hairdressers), as well as individuals and collective agencies - not just farmers.
Various considerations lend interest to such an approach. A specific case is the contrasting trend in rural employment in the Orkney Islands compared to Caithness, the adjacent region of mainland Scotland. In the former employment has risen 8 % in the last decade or so, whereas in the latter it has gone down by 6 %. The differential performance does not seem explainable by agriculture, directly or indirectly, and so calls for analysis of problems (and successes) of rural well-being that does not look solely through agricultural spectacles. Considering rural employment more generally, the history of the CAP shows that a notable consequence of focusing on farms and farmers is that large ones with most of the assets get most of the money. But there is a long-term trend, likely to continue, for large farms to offer less and less local employment. More so than small farms, they tend to substitute machines for people generally, and in particular people from outside the area, such as consultants and contractors based in cities, for people from the locality. Some at least of the money they receive under the CAP is funding these trends.
The problem of employment is more complicated than a simple function of farm size, however. It is not the same everywhere. In remote areas where there is little alternative employment, policies that favour small farms which will continue to offer jobs may serve the purposes of rural development. There, small farms constitute a valuable resource for rural development and may indeed promote a 'living countryside' through low-intensity, environmentally-friendly practices Agenda 2000 claims to favour as well as engaging in other economic activities. But in rural areas near to urban centres or accessible to them via good transport links, there may be a range of alternative employment available already or accessible given individual initiative. An agricultural policy that favoured small farms at the expense of large ones might incur costs to competitiveness not compensated by employment benefits. Some kinds of small farms in such areas might constitute an obstacle to efficiency, because the land and other inputs they take up are not available to large farms that could make more productive use of them. Any rural policy designed to deal with rural diversity must therefore also be able to deal with different agrarian conditions.
Any comparative appraisal of alternative approaches to rural well-being should note that while sectoral market policies for agriculture have their theoretical limitations and difficult history, so too do rural development policies, at least as they have evolved in the EU15. These policies no longer conform to any coherent theory of regional economic development because they have accumulated disparate components with successive rounds of negotiations, particularly those to do with admitting new members. A notable instance of this is the increasing number of Objectives and the proportion of the total area and population covered by them. Finland and Sweden negotiated a new Objective 6 oriented specifically to their rural needs; the Irish and the Highland Scots have proved creative calculators in qualifying for the various Structural Funds associated with Objectives 1 and 5b, at least in terms of the criteria laid down by Brussels. One of the main proposals in Agenda 2000 is to 'simplify' the various provisions that bear on rural development: the number of relevant objectives is reduced to just two, and the eligibility rules are stricter. These changes may not make rural development policy any more coherent, but they do suggest dissatisfaction with the way such policies have worked in the past and a disinclination to back the Cork Declaration on A Living Countryside with appropriate shifts in the emphasis of policy from the traditional sectoral concerns of agriculture to the holistic concerns of rural development.
Outside the EU15 in the CEEC10 there are comparable historical legacies. There is a common legacy of strongly centrist state structures, with correspondingly weak regional organisation and administrative traditions. The post-war collectivisation of agriculture has bequeathed the post-1989 problems of de-collectivisation, restitution of property appropriated by the state, and what attitude to adopt towards the sale of land to foreign interests.
By the same token, particular states have particular inheritances. Three examples must suffice. In Poland collectivisation was long resisted with considerable success and so never became as widespread or as entrenched as in other CEECs. So Poland now enters accession negotiations on agriculture with a large number of small family farms, at a time when the CAP is under pressure from budgetary concerns and international trade agreements monitored by the WTO. The effect on rural areas, if thousands of families ceased to support themselves by farming, would set quite a challenge for any rural development policy. In Romania many rural areas were de-populated in previous decades, but since 1989 many people have returned from the cities to eke out a living on small plots of the land. Adding to this pressure on land is the decline of mining, which has left many people in rural areas, who were previously not dependent on agriculture, now looking for alternative ways of making a living there. So from political necessity much attention has been given in national policy to rural development, to the comparative neglect of agriculture. However, the pre-accession programme SAPARD is primarily addressed to agriculture.
Finally, in Hungary before 1989 agricultural policy had not taken much account of environmental concerns, and to the extent these were addressed, this was done separately. Nor did agricultural policy consider the impact of agricultural practices on the regional and local environment. Since 1989 new ministerial structures have been developed, with new allocations of responsibilities. In addition, agro-ecological regions have been mapped and assessed according to market conditions and defined as suitable for intensive or extensive agriculture, or protection, with particular concern for wetland regions and water protection. This has apparently afforded greater scope for integrating agricultural and environmental policies, and in accession negotiations, the possibility of 'trading' agricultural provisions and measures for rural development ones in ways not available to or not considered by other acceding CEECs.
There is a further problem that is common to all acceding CEECs, in addition to those arising from their individual traditions in agricultural and rural development policy. They must take on board the policies of the EU for both, as embodied in the acquis communautaire, all at once, unless they can negotiate some derogation. Member States have (in most cases) had many years to accommodate themselves to these policies, both their benefits and their costs; they have learnt to live with them in their own way. By contrast, CEECs face the task not just of devising feasible policies that are acceptable nationally but also are acceptable to both the Commission and to existing Member States. Given the uneasy relations between agriculture and rural development in the Commission and each Member state, acceding CEECs may be forgiven for feeling that they have rather too many masters to please. That these masters do not agree among themselves about the proper domains of agriculture and rural development, and tend to change their minds with time and circumstance, can only add to that feeling.
Conclusion
In both Member and Acceding States, as things stand, rural development tends to be
seen largely
through agricultural eyes. Whether this is a legacy of past thinking entrenched in
institutional
structures that have not changed though the thinking may have, or is the result of
calculated
compromises negotiated nationally or internationally, it is the way things are.
Agenda 2000 reflects
this reality and plans to implement it must accommodate it. This gives rise to a
more sharply
focused question: given that is the way of the world, and of Agenda 2000, how best
to deal with
those realities? How to make the most of what is on offer in Agenda 2000: cope with
or get around
its limitations and restrictions, which in the short term cannot be removed, and use
to best
advantage what scope it allows to adapt its provisions to meet the needs of
individual states, locally
and regionally as well as nationally? Moreover, how to do all that starting from
where we are now
- rather than from some other place more to our liking or later when times may be
easier. This
practical question pervaded the Seminar, as it does the rest of this report.
It is noteworthy for example that the conference on rural development organised by DGVI in November 1996 that issued the Cork Declaration, A Living Countryside, was followed five months later by the Cohesion Forum in May 1997 organised by DGXVI. Both meetings were held during the gestation of Agenda 2000, which the Commission published in July 1997, and there has been much speculation about the influence each exerted on it.
The discussion in Agenda 2000 begins with a section entitled 'Continuing to Strive for Cohesion'. When it comes to the subject of the Cohesion Fund it first "propose[s] that this fund be maintained in its present form" (p.24). Member States whose per capita GNP is less than 90% of the Community average will remain eligible to receive support. The Fund is to provide "support for the whole territory" of those "less prosperous Member States" but in limited ways: thus it is said to be "aimed exclusively at projects concerned with the environment and transport".
Having stated that "support from the Structural Funds and the Cohesion Fund should in theory apply to all the countries which join" the EU (p.25), it then qualifies this by saying that this theory needs to be modified in practice "to avoid major problems with regard to absorption". Aid will be limited to 4 % of national GDP and while "primarily" concerned with "infrastructure in the transport and environment fields", it would also help applicant states "become familiar with the procedures concerning structural operations", such as the workings of co-financing requirements, partnerships, regional programming, monitoring and evaluation. Not only are there significant weaknesses in regional structures in most of the CEEC's, but significant regional disparities exist within each of them. The development of viable regional structures in Slovenia is estimated to take at least ten to fifteen years. Although 'top-down' regional development programmes began thirty years ago under the rubric of 'polycentric development', not all of the initiatives undertaken have proven successful. In Romania levels of development vary greatly, from much activity in Transylvania to much less in the south and the east of the country where there are lagging regions.
While the first paragraph of the next section talks variously about the "reduction of economic and social disparities", a "vision of territorial development", and "a demanding and decentralized partnership to facilitate the preparation of integrated regional and social development strategies", the title of the section is "Enhancing cost-effectiveness". The rest of the section sets out how cost- effectiveness will be enhanced. It proposes that the 'system' applying to existing member States be 'simplified' by reducing the Objectives from six to three, and calls for "a clear division of responsibilities between the national, regional and local authorities and the Commission".
To provide a background to the discussion of these matters at the Seminar, it may be useful to set out some of the history behind these proposals. A general principle, endorsed in successive Treaties since the founding of the EEC in 1957, is that regional differences in levels of socio- economic development should be redressed. Thus Article 2 of the Treaty of Rome talks of "harmonious development of economic activities, a continuous and balanced expansion, an increase in stability, an accelerated raising of the standard of living"". The rationale for this is that the more harmonious, or to give some operational sense to that fine phrase, the less 'uneven' the level of development and the fewer 'lagging' regions there are in the Community (now the Union), the more unified would be the Union as a whole; and a more unified Union is in the interest of all regions of it.
Over time, policies to promote such harmonious development were devised and revised. The prevailing strategy was to increase cohesion among Member States by decreasing socio-economic disparities between regions. Thus the long-established European Social Fund (ESF) came to take on a regional character and in 1975 the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) was established. As with all efforts of the EU to implement principle in practice, these revisions and institutions involved hard bargaining, in the case of the ERDF notably with the UK, formally admitted to membership two years earlier after a decade of negotiations.
The same general principle was subsequently applied at the level of states, rather than regions within states. The Single European Act of 1986 contained a new chapter on 'Economic and Social Cohesion', while the Treaty on European Union of 1992 established a new instrument, the Cohesion Fund, to help promote the principle. This time the bargaining involved what have come to be called the 'Cohesion states', Ireland, Greece, Spain and Portugal. All except Ireland were more or less new members, and net beneficiaries of the instrument used to redistribute resources and benefits from 'more' developed to 'less' developed states, by then referred to as the 'Structural Funds'.
The Structural Funds were devised as an instrument of cohesion policy during negotiations over the Single Market. It was argued that the benefits and costs resulting from access to a larger market would not be equally distributed among all states, let alone among all regions within states. Benefits would go largely to the richer states and regions, costs largely to the poorer ones. Without some form of redistribution, poorer states argued there would be no point in their joining, or consenting to, the Single Market. Richer states in turn argued that unless after redistribution there was a net economic gain, there was no point in their doing so either. Accordingly, the Structural Funds were devised, with the intention that they would operate so as to reduce the disparities stemming from the uneven distribution of benefits and costs, while preserving the net gain from the economies of the Single Market.
Such was the original intention. Realising that intention in practice was never going to be easy. The diversity of regions within the EU gave rise to a number of difficulties. What kind of regional differences count as disparities? When does a disparity merit being redressed at the expense of other regions? How to decide priorities of claims on the Structural Funds: is there a hierarchy of comparative disadvantage? How also to evolve compatibility with competition policies and state aid rules aiming to prevent 'unfair' competition?
Then there were the difficult questions of what methods of redressing disparities are appropriate; what criteria, to be applied uniformly over all regions, should be used in deciding whether the disparities have been redressed; and how to arrive at a consensus among beneficiaries and contributors that could survive the pressures of national politics and the deliverances of 'events' long enough for plans to be devised and implemented before the next round of reforms changed the eligibility rules.
In the event, the 1988 reform of the Structural Funds resulted in the old criteria of 'lagging development' or 'not developed enough' were supplemented by others to do with low population density, and the decline of agriculture. Concern about similar long-term decline in urban and industrial areas, together with questioning of the continuing relevance in many areas of the distinction between 'the rural' and 'the urban' strengthened the feeling that regional policy as pursued via the Structural Funds no longer corresponded to any coherent theory of socio-economic development.
But if the criteria of eligibility no longer cohere in a credible policy to redress regional disparities in all their diversity - mountains, plains, rural, urban, agricultural, industrial, lagging, stagnating, declining - and so promote EU-wide cohesion, then the only reason for agreeing to use them becomes instrumental: how much must a Member state give, how much can it get. Considerations other than money - such as what is the best way to pursue regional development - come later.
Given past practice, it is no surprise that the prospect of Eastern enlargement at the end of the century should prompt a further round of debate on regional policy. All Member States thus have an interest in Agenda 2000's proposals, for under the old rules, acceding CEECs would get most of the funds, current beneficiaries would lose much of their benefits, and current contributors would be called upon to contribute more. This time though, the debate is proceeding in anticipation of the enlargement rather than subsequent to it, in recognition that the past response of the EU, to add via negotiated compromises new 'disadvantages' and corresponding Objectives to the existing list, will work in the case of Eastern enlargement. And the economic and consequently political circumstances under which the debate has proceeded are also novel.
For much of the 1990s, most Member States experienced low rates of economic growth with sustained high levels of structural unemployment. Net contributors felt themselves stretched to provide the current levels of funding, and came under national political pressure to find ways of benefiting from the Funds themselves. Germany, traditionally the largest net contributor to the Structural Funds, encountered difficulty financing re-unification with the former DDR, and for the first time made claims on the Funds based on regional unemployment in the five eastern Länder. Net beneficiaries such as Spain, Ireland and Greece came to the conclusion that benefits based on disparities in the existing fashion were coming to an end and have sought ways of making best use of funds while they last. Greece for one planned to complete large infrastructure projects financed with support from the Structural Funds, such as railways, as soon as possible.
Against this historical and economic background, the attitudes Member States have come to adopt show up as increasingly instrumentalist. German representatives are reported to have remarked at one meeting that in practice regional policy was getting to be like a menu. Every state or indeed region should be able to find some disparity that fits some Objective and so would sustain a claim to funds. You choose the disparity that best meets your needs, then negotiate on the strength of that. The claim, also attributed to German negotiators, that all states that qualify for EMU, such as under the Phase III criteria, should be regarded as 'developed' and so no longer in need of redistributional transfers from the Cohesion and Structural Funds, may be seen as a response to such practices.
One reading of the provisions for regional policy in Agenda 2000 is that these various pressures and influences have in the event issued in small and complicated funds to be allocated via principles of horizontality. On this reading, the question arises whether there is a case for saying that the game is not worth the candle, and that Member States, present and future, should revert to national funding.
One consequence of administering the Structural Funds horizontally is that if the only or principal way to get at them is via agriculture, then scope for devising rural development programmes to reduce regional disparities will be reduced. Moreover, as competition for scarce funds increases, European-level funding will tend to become ever more like a zero-sum game. Co-financing requirements, for example, may operate so that states unable to meet the criteria will lose out to those that can, to which re-nationalisation would be the rational response.
In practice, re-nationalising in some form is already underway. The Commission accepts it is unable to make the fine discriminations needed in selecting the best regional development projects to support, and so leaves this to member States (whether they are able to do it, and if so are inclined to do it properly, is another matter). There is now a delicate balancing act between EU and nation states over money, measures and monitoring, one that is far from stable as the allocation of competencies continues to evolve.
But whole-hearted re-nationalisation would have unappetising consequences of its own. For one, it would put necessarily long-term rural development plans at the mercy of the inevitably short-term politics of national elections and re-election strategies. Besides, efforts to change the basis of the system from European to national would take time and trouble, probably more than is available or worth spending. This would apply even if they were (in some sense or other) 'successful' - which seems none too likely, though lessons might be learnt for the next round of negotiations on the successor to Agenda 2000.
Rather than wholesale re-nationalistion, a possible alternative response to Agenda 2000 could be the traditional one of trying to make the most of what is on offer. One way of doing this would be to explore what scope there is for alliances between poorer regions of Member States and Acceding States to ensure that the diversity of conditions and needs are actually met, and that priorities are properly targeted. This could mitigate the effects of horizontality favoured by richer states. As power continues to shift downwards from the national level and outwards from the centre, there should be more scope for poorer regions to lobby Brussels directly, circumventing some of the power to control and the influence of those richer regions and interests for whom central control is beneficial.
A longer-term consideration looks beyond Agenda 2000 to the next round of negotiations. Member States are aware that the way the rules are set in Agenda 2000, and how they are applied under its provisions, will influence what rules will be set in the future, and so determine who will get what when the CAP and the Structural Funds come up for reform once more. In their turn, acceding CEECs need to become aware of this. They should, for example, consider which rules and applications in Agenda 2000 are likely to be retained and which might be superseded, to avoid making long-term structural changes and investments based on short-term circumstances, including rules which as outsiders they did not have a say in setting but later as insiders they may have a say in revising. In considering the merits of such alternative responses, it is useful to look at the experience of some member States in dealing with disparities and cohesion in the period leading up to that of Agenda 2000, and how they propose to deal with them in future. Greece, Italy and Scotland provide representative cases:
(i) Greece
The first Community Support Framework in Greece, from 1989 to 1993, did not succeed
in
reducing regional disparities. The second, from 1994 to 2000, had some success in
reducing
disparities among the thirteen regions, but not within these regions. The GDP of a
region as
a whole may have risen, but because of internal movement of people, such as from the
mountains to the cities, the growth in the latter was associated, causally or not,
with the
stagnation or decline of the former. Plans being drawn up under Agenda 2000 for the
period
from the year 2000 sought to learn from this experience.
One proposal was for institutional change. Previously, the 6000 local communes had proved unmanageable, so they are to be combined to form 900 municipalities. Each of these will assess their needs and potential, then submit strategic proposals to the regional level (NUTS levels 2 and 3). Differences within regions are considered there, such as mountainous areas and islands, where the problems of fragmented space may require special interventions at national rather than regional level. Otherwise, development projects are selected at regional level and managed at local level. The criteria for selection include contribution to the maintenance of population, the strengthening of economic activity and social life, and environmental protection.
(ii) Italy
In post-war Italy measures to reduce regional disparities could not be called a
'plan' because
of the associations of that term with the Communist party that was politically
powerful until
the 1980s. The 1947 Constitution gave formal competence to the regions, but these
regions
did not effectively come into being until the 1970s.
The central and northern regions took most advantage of this decentralisation, and over time came to bypass the national level of administration, looking directly to the European level instead. The particular problems of the Mezzogiorno had long been recognised in specific national funding for the region, but satisfactory administrative structures were never developed. This is reflected in the fate of the LEADER Initiative in Sicily, where structures and responsibilities came to be divided among more and more groups; one group that should have begun operations at the beginning of the programme is starting only now, at its end.
Overall Italy has made less use of the Structural Funds than other Member States, largely because the national funds have been generous while the rules governing European funds are complex and comparatively troublesome. In northern regions, until the 1988 reform of the Structural Funds, the national level allocated sectoral funds to the regions, and the regions devised sectoral programmes. What was actually done tended to be rather different from what the plans had said, with experts exerting much influence. Since 1988, some northern regions have developed new structures specifically to deal with the European level. Under the co-financing requirements, regional funds have to be used if European funds are to become available. The Emilia Romagna now operates solely via the European structure, the administrative structure to deal with the national level having withered away. Other regions have retained the double structure, but in time seem likely to follow the Emilia Romagna rather than continue duplication that though historically understandable seems ultimately irrational.
The largest disparities remain between mountainous regions and those on the plains. Every regional plan has been required to make specific provisions for mountain areas, but in practice these have not been followed by actual spending. The capacity to implement the provisions has not been developed. In general, the old sectoral rather than integrated approaches remain the norm, and the oldest disparity of all, between the North and the South, has increased over the fifty years of regional policy. There have been improvements in the South, but not enough to keep pace with the North.
(iii) Scotland
In comparison with most regions in CEECs, Scotland is already 'developed', but that
does not
mean it is without regional disparities. Young people in rural areas cannot find
jobs, either at
all or of a kind that will stop or slow the drift to the cities. Shops are closing
not just in the
Highlands and on remote islands but one hour from Aberdeen. The persistence of such
problems has raised concern about the methods used to address them. Many years of
central
government schemes such as building roads, connecting electricity and supplying water
entrenched the attitude in regions and local areas that rural development was
something
others did for or to you, so the best strategy to adopt was to complain to the
relevant
government department. To the extent this strategy worked, it had the effect of
rewarding
passive dependence and narrow-mindedness that refused to recognise the constraints
under
which governments must operate. On the part of government, it fostered the
complementary
attitude that gave rise to single-sector programmes designed at the centre to a
standard pattern
that considered diversity as an afterthought, if at all.
The recent Government policy statement on rural development in Scotland Towards a Development Strategy for Rural Scotland3 [August 1998] sought to change such attitudes. It argued that the task of central government is to establish a framework that promotes integrated programmes designed and delivered locally (or regionally, as appropriate) according to local (or regional) needs and resources. Central government should concern itself with setting goals and objectives and monitoring outcomes, not with prescribing the details of programmes and measures; these should be the concerns of localities and regions, who know (or should be able to find out ) more about them. It should also see that different government departments, concerned with housing, education, health, transport, agriculture, industry and so on, acted in concert rather than separately, and with a view to the particular needs of diverse rural areas, rather than of Scotland as a whole, urban and rural alike.
For their part, local areas were to assess their own needs and devise their own plans to deal with them - rather than present an unsorted list of wants and wishes and expect 'others', such as central government or 'Brussels', to meet them. This would require that they find out what indeed the local needs are and determine priorities. They should be active in consulting diverse local interests, not just 'official' elected or administrative bodies, before drawing up plans rather than after; they should inform themselves about how national and European policies and instruments work, rather than assume that the CAP and the Structural Funds were not local concerns.
All parties - not just both 'sides' - should see themselves engaged in a common task, rather than in adversarial combat or competitive turf wars. Each would contribute according to their various abilities: to co-ordinate departmental effort, to determine how EU funding could best be used to implement local plans; to apply knowledge and mobilise resources that are accessible only at local level. It was appreciated that the disciplines of planning - assessing needs and resources, recognising constraints, deciding priorities, setting objectives, and in general thinking strategically over the long term rather concentrating on short-term tactics for getting the most money this year - take time to learn. So too do the habits of mind and practical skills required in reaching and maintaining consensus on what all, collectively, are trying to do - rather than just 'working together' or 'telling one another what you are doing'. Accordingly there was no expectation that things would go right first time, but over time effort and experience should refine procedures and build capacity at all levels. Then a better balance between the various levels could be arrived at, and in place of the old top-down sectoral centrism, with complementary local complaining dependency, there could be bottom- up integrated plans tailored to diverse local circumstances and co-ordinated at regional level to facilitate exchange of ideas, smooth information flows and reduce over-laps, lacunae and anomalies.
Conclusion
The ideal set out in Towards a Development Strategy for Rural Scotland
meets some but
not
all the difficulties in dealing with regional disparities. In Scotland, as
elsewhere, there
remains the problem (among others) of sub-regional diversity, whether called
'differences' or
'disparities'. Diversity at sub-regional level may call for intra-regional
transfers, which may
be difficult to negotiate at regional rather than national level. The more fragile a
sub-region,
the greater its need but the less its capacity to address them, and the weaker its
negotiating
power compared to more robust sub-regions. The common requirement that European or
national funds be matched by local funds, though intended as a way of ensuring local
participation, may work against poorer areas that are unable to raise them because
they are
poor. Both cases are instances of an abiding difficulty of regional policy: how to
devise
schemes that the richer areas are not in practice able to use to their advantage more
than poor
regions, so that disparities actually decrease rather than remain or even increase as
a result of
the scheme.
The three examples of attempts to redress disparities in the European Union as it has come to be in the late 1990s have all, in their different ways, drawn attention to the next two issues discussed by the Seminar: first, the problem of the proper competencies to allocate to the European, national, regional and local levels of operation; second, the role of partnerships, which have been advocated as a solution to some aspects of that problem. The next section of this report looks at the first of these.
Particularly influential on the gestation of Agenda 2000 was the growing disenchantment with elitist rule by Monnet-style experts and technocrats, and concern about the dearth of checks and balances on the power of un-elected and remote European institutions. The debacles of the Danish and French referenda on the ratification of the Treaty of Maastricht were the most spectacular expressions of this, but there were others, of which the disinclination of Norway to pursue membership at the expense of ceding to others control (in some measure) of its sensitive resources is noteworthy in the present negotiations on Eastern enlargement.
There is evidence of this in the opening remarks of Agenda 2000. In reviewing "What has been achieved since the Single Act" (p.11f), amid the self-congratulation two "difficulties" are singled out. The first is economic, in particular unemployment, while the second is described as "of a political and psychological nature". The Maastricht ratification "debate", it is suggested, "revealed that the general public had not kept up with the accelerating pace of institutional change". They "did not feel properly involved" (p.12).
One response to this so-called 'democratic deficit' has been to think anew about allocation of competencies: what should be done at European level, what at local level, and what at levels in between? The 'principle of subsidiarity' was borrowed from the Vatican and thereafter regularly invoked: solutions should be pursued and decisions should be taken at the lowest level possible (other things being equal). But this of course raises a fundamental question: how to determine, for the EU at the end of the century and on the eve of Eastern enlargement, what is best done at which level?
The general 'retreat of the state' observed in the last quarter of the twentieth century, of which the principle of subsidiarity may be seen as but one expression, seems to have had a number of more particular causes - apart, that is, from the acceptance (or not) of philosophical arguments about the legitimacy with which duties and responsibilities have been claimed by or allocated to the state. One was growing doubt about the ability of the state to discharge adequately, or more adequately than other institutions, its existing tasks. Its power to tax has declined with its reputation for efficient delivery of administrative funcions from the centre to the periphery.
These doubts connected with another debate about fundamental issues, this time in political economy. After some decades of what came to be called Keynesian consensus, the question addressed in 1776 by Adam Smith came to be asked with practical concern for how to do things two centuries later. What is the origin and cause of the wealth of nations? In particular, what relations between rulers and people promote its generation and what obstruct it? In the wake of a number of global events in the 1970s - notably the oil crises and the subsequent unprecedented combination of economic stagnation, high inflation and long-term structural unemployment - fashion in political economy turned against the state and towards the market, coming to regard the former as an obstacle to the efficient operation of the latter. This was later reinforced by International agreements on the reduction of levels of national protection of agriculture and other industries, and loss of national control over monetary and fiscal policy partly as a result of applications of new information and communications technology, especially the Internet.
One consequence, intended or not, of this kind of decentralisation to the market, was to encourage thinking about how to design alternative administrative structures that would be more appropriate to a diminished role for the centralised state and an expanded one for dispersed markets. Such thinking in the case of the EU amounts to thinking about the allocation of competencies.
After the institution of the Single European Act with its unified market, then the Treaty of Maastricht with its timetable for monetary union - swiftly followed by the Maastricht ratification debacle - the concern with economic efficiency struck a chord with political interest in devolving responsibility, away from top-down processes and procedures and towards those that worked from the bottom-up. In the EU, this change received perhaps clearest expression in the conception and operation of the LEADER Initiatives after 1991, but may also be discerned in a general receptiveness to ideas about the re-allocation of competencies of all kinds.
The EU being what it is, the broad considerations discussed so far should be set against narrower, sharper ones. Confessions by higher levels of their incompetence and their voluntary renunciation in favour of lower levels of (some) powers may indeed be prompted by concern for the greater good, such as reducing democratic deficits and increasing economic efficiency. It may also be prompted by more pragmatic, prudential reasons, such as a desire to pass the buck and get out of the firing line. Brussels has long recognised that among other services it provides a convenient scapegoat when things go wrong or are neglected altogether.
For their part, national governments have long been wary of devolving too much power to the regions. If they do, regions may find it all too congenial to be able to bypass the national and go straight to European level, not least because they might thereby avoid or at least moderate national policies and constraints.
But as at European level there are more positive reasons why there has been interest in re-allocating competencies within national states. There is a long-term trend of devolution from central state to the regions, and of integration within regions. This is not just a matter of regional politics and the associated horse-trading, nor of the diminishing power of central state to tax that is both a cause and consequence of the general retreat of the state. It also has to do with a re-assessment of regional differences. There is greater appreciation that these may not always be just a store of trouble and an ever-flowing spring of ungrateful complaint. On occasion at least they may be the source of solutions.
When differences are conceived as "disparities", they sound as if they are problems in need of structural remedies via regional policy. When they are thought of as aspects of regional "diversity", there is the possibility that they may constitute distinctive resources, which though characteristically immobile, are therefore uniquely available to local areas to address local problems.
This raises the question of how to gain access to and mobilise such resources. Answering that question becomes the more important when coupled with recognition of the declining ability and inclination of the central state to deliver resources from outside the locality to deal with local problems.
If the state at national level cannot supply the resources a locality needs, either because it has not got them itself or cannot command other regions to transfer them, then the locality must supply them or go without. Some it may have already, others it may need to find. It may well be in the interest of the national level to help the local level develop its capacity to supply its own needs, not least because this would reduce their demands on it.
Because local resources are dispersed, so too is knowledge of what they are, where they are, and how to get at them. Knowledge of what resources are needed but lacking is also dispersed. As well as knowledge of what resources are available locally and what are needed, local resources here include being in a better position to allocate them efficiently under local conditions. Some monitoring of where resources go and evaluating how well they have been used may be easier and perhaps more effective when done locally rather than at various administrative removes. At national level, this may be difficult to do at all, or to do conveniently, quickly, and cheaply.
By the same token however, development projects dispersed over a range of localities can be integrated effectively (whether locally, regionally or nationally) only where the information needed to do so is readily available. Information constitutes usable knowledge only when it can be brought together. This requires channels through which information can flow quickly and smoothly. Doing this efficiently is an important consideration in allocating competencies to different levels.
Practical experience and problems
The Commission is responsible for EU money being well spent. It deals with Member
States
at national level, holding them accountable for their programmes that draw on EU
funds and
setting various conditions on their relation to national funding, notably through
applying the
principle of 'additionality' with varying degrees of subtlety and through financial
control
mechanisms. The Commission will not talk formally to regions without the invitation
and
approval of national governments, and even then has no formal competence to negotiate
with
them. National states can break up existing regional structures and devise new ones
to gain
(better) access to EU funds, but such changes are for Member States to sort out for
themselves; it is not for the Commission to say. Nevertheless, the Commission can
influence
this process, for example by laying down rules for the type of administrative region
which
may be eligible for Objective 1 or 2 status, and by state aids rules which apply
inside and
outside these boundaries.
In any event, the experience of Member States suggests that it is generally unwise for them to ask the Commission for its suggestions, as distinct from asking its opinion of specific proposals of their own devising. The Commission will always prefer fewer programmes, which are easier for it to deal with. Within programmes however, it is always keen to see funds tightly allocated to specific areas, because this makes it easier for it to exercise control. Accordingly, Member States generally find it prudent to opt for fewer measures and objectives rather than more, because this gives them greater flexibility and more scope for adjustment to meet changing circumstances as programmes proceed.
Global grants have to be allocated, programmes put together, and individual projects selected and monitored, at some level or other. For a structure of competencies to work to best advantage, be it 'most efficiently', with 'greatest value for money', or 'most effectively in developing rural areas', the various levels must not only be allocated tasks most appropriate to them but their separate operations have to be integrated as well. As Agenda 2000 is implemented, who does what will be settled one way or another. While things are still being sorted out, the relevant questions to ask may be first, what is the best level for dealing with present problems and second, how to take best advantage of what is on offer. The most appropriate level should get the finance. The answers to these questions may be different for different regions and different problems, so it is well to beware of commitments to standardised formulas and inflexible structures.
At national level most states have traditionally favoured the sectoral approach because it is administratively convenient and conducive to exercising political and financial control. Over the years the sectoral divisions have become entrenched in separate bureaucratic structures; co-operation between sectors tends to go against the grain, thus reinforcing the original sectoral divisions and exacerbating their rigidity. Lobby groups, their noses trained to detect where power lies and eyes peeled to discern its structural manifestation, have mirrored their organisation to that of the government, the more so in states where the government is strongly centrist. At local level, many localities have long been accustomed to have outsiders do things for them, and may be content for that to continue - not least because they do not care for the bother of learning a different way, particularly one that requires them to act for themselves rather than just complain from a sedentary position.
But if any level, be it European or local or those in between, decides that the old ways cannot or should not continue, a number of practical problems arise. As well as defining and agreeing on an alternative, there is the problem of how to implement the change. How to get people to forsake the old sectoral way, from the top down and a single centre out, to a new allocation, which devolved competencies and responsibilities to lower levels and dispersed them over a number of smaller areas? Once this devolved and de-centralised structure is established, how to integrate its operations so they work not just satisfactorily but better than the old way in meeting the needs and aspirations of the various levels?
An example of this is the way partnerships for rural development tend to be organised at regional and local level, whereas farmers' lobby groups are organised at national level. When farmers are asked to join such rural development schemes, they may ask why they should get involved locally when they have a direct route to the top, to the national, or indeed to the European level. But as the lobby leadership comes to recognise that they can no longer deliver ever-increasing subsidies to their local members via national lobbying, they too may look to other levels where they can pursue their sectoral interests more effectively under the new conditions. Farmers themselves are coming to recognise that their interests may be increasingly or better served locally.
The value of establishing local markets and local identities for agricultural produce will increase as favourable access to guaranteed markets for undifferentiated commodities is threatened by international negotiations under the WTO. The recent development of farmers markets in the UK is one manifestation of this4.
Such changes in the locus of activities may be seen as an illustration of the principle of subsidiarity at work, albeit applied this time to lobbyists. For lobbyists will tend to operate, effectively in practice if not officially in principle, at the level at which decisions are taken. If there is a change in the level at which power is exercised , so too will there be a change in the locus of their activities.
The same goes for regions and the loyalties of citizens. Increasingly, regions are lobbying Brussels directly, bypassing the national level, especially if regions are making decisions of their own and the plans and policies of diverse regions differ from one another. The German Länder have long maintained their own offices in Brussels and since the 1980s most Local Authorities in the UK have set up a European unit to identify European funding programmes that could benefit their locality and increase their chance of sharing in them. Under the circumstances in the UK, this would also serve to loosen the control of the (national) Treasury over Local Authority spending, a contentious issue when a central policy of the national (Conservative) government was to reduce public spending while many local authorities were controlled by the opposing (Labour) party. For its part, the Treasury might seek to retain control via the condition that European funding be complemented by 'matching funds' from local authority or other budgets, this being particularly effective where the revenue raising powers of local authorities are severely constrained.
If the game is about grabbing funds5 then attention will move quickly to wherever the money is. Administrative structures that develop in response to particular funding procedures will tend to be ephemeral, because those procedures are ephemeral. Because rural development programmes are a long-term business, however, they need to be integrated into regional forms that can avoid dependence on what may amount to subsidy. That way they may increase their chance of accommodating changes in funding procedure and so survive changes in funding fashion.
Institutional engineering in response to funding courts the danger of developing duality of structures. Newly-created regional bodies with no track record and little experience will have difficulty in being taken seriously. Partnerships may have large budgets, but because they are un-elected their legitimacy in relation to democratically-elected local government may be questioned. There is a need to integrate transient structures into regional forms that can be locally legitimate and sustainable in the long run.
The 1996 Cohesion report6 showed that regional policy had worked satisfactorily at state level but not at regional level within states. There were notable differences between states. In Portugal and Ireland, for example, whose state structure had long been centralised, European funding tended to be allocated by the state to regions surrounding the capital cities of Lisbon and Dublin. These regions grew richer while peripheral regions grew poorer, though the state as a whole grew richer.
All CEECs have a legacy of centralism from the pre-1989 regimes, if not earlier, with regions having relatively little power. Accordingly, they need to develop the capacity of their regions, particularly so if states which lack distinct or powerful regions because of long tradition of centralism find themselves at a disadvantage in negotiating regional policy at European level with the Commission. Acceding States need to organise themselves at regional level before dealing with the Commission: it is not prudent for a state to have to say "we may need to change things when we hear from the regions".
This raises various questions about the relation between kinds of regional institutions and outcomes for development. For example, how to aggregate local areas into appropriate size and number of regions? CEECs seeking to develop regional structures to overcome centralism need to know such things; they benefit from the experience of Member States.
Good decision-making requires, among other things such as ready access to good information, that the decision-makers are competent enough to recognise and be able to implement the best of the available options. At regional level this requires strong regions. This in turn requires that the national level institutes policies to strengthen weaker regions so they can operate effectively in regional-level decision-making processes.
Incentives to build capacity have to be greater in weaker regions; otherwise the classic vicious cycle of regional inequality will operate. Disparities will tend to increase, the ability of weaker regions to deal with them decrease, and with it their power to bargain with stronger regions. The corollary to this is that national government has to be strong enough to say 'no' to rich and vocal regions and 'yes' to poor and weaker regions. A democratic mandate is helpful if not indeed necessary for this: private agencies and commercial institutions would find it difficult. The democratically-elected rural parliaments established in Hungary with power to influence the distribution of development funds looks like an interesting idea worth transferring where possible.
Lobbying organisations, developmental as well as sectoral, tend to be stronger in rich regions; how to strengthen the lobbying power of weaker regions? In Scotland some say the Highland and Island Enterprise, which is a non-departmental public body (NDPB), has too much lobbying power, leading other regions to feel hard done by. By general agreement, the Shetland Islanders are the best lobbyists of all partly because of their ability to supply matching funding from their own oil revenues negotiated in the early stages of oil exploitation in the North Sea in the 1970's.
In Romania the level of development and of activity to deal with the problems of different regions varies greatly. Each wants to develop in its own way by its own methods. This raises the question of how to accommodate regional needs, aspirations and plans to the national interest. At what level should decisions about how to support regional development be made: among regions or at national level?
One approach would be for regions to agree among themselves to set appropriate developmental criteria, for example, linking employment created to regional unemployment rates. Targets could be set for each region, and projects evaluated according to how they meet them. There may be no need to use the same regional division to allocate development resources as is used in political and other administrative affairs; the political division may be a traditional inheritance that cuts across current developmental needs. Further, specific resources, perhaps from a number of neighbouring regions, could be allocated to local enterprise companies to meet needs of fragile areas as part of intra-regional cohesion policy.
Lessons from the LEADER Initiatives
The experience of LEADER I and II has cast light on a number of aspects of the EU, of
which
the competencies of its institutions is one particular example. The way LEADER
worked, or
failed to work, in different Member States both revealed what was needed and
indicated ways
of supplying the need where it was lacking. Where the state was excessively
centralised, the
difficulties in establishing LEADER demonstrated this, while also playing a part in
developing the needed capacity. The nature of LEADER meant this occurred primarily
at
local level but, by calling attention to the need to strengthen it, at intermediate
regional level
between the centralised state and local communities.
An additional benefit of LEADER programmes that are successful in building capacity at local and regional levels is that capacity is then available for use in other ways than those to do with LEADER. Notably, it can provide experience of operating in ways that are not sectoral, do not proceed from the centre out nor operate from the top down. Such experience is valuable to Member and Acceding States alike in getting used to re-allocations of competencies.
Ex-post evaluation of LEADER I showed that the way it worked in practice was affected by the different institutional arrangements of competencies in the Member States. Germany, for instance, already had in place the structure for a village-renewal scheme, and used this to implement LEADER. France too had a number of local-level institutions, which it used for LEADER. By contrast, in Ireland the local community level was deemed too small to implement LEADER effectively, so larger units were devised. At national level, it seems, Greece did a good job, Italy a bad job.
More generally, across all Member States, three broad cases may be distinguished:
The ex-post evaluation of LEADER II has yet to be undertaken. It used a generalised global grant mechanism, negotiated between Brussels and national governments, and so was centralised not by specific measures employed but rather by monitoring the outcomes of how the Local Action Groups chose to allocate funds to projects associated with the various measures. There is a widespread view that the mechanisms of central government or government agency control over Local Action Groups increased between LEADER I and LEADER II, but the outcomes of this have yet to be determined.
Conclusion
The European Union, like its predecessors, operates according to a blend of
pragmatism and
principle, the exact proportions varying with time and circumstance. Since the
1970s, the
way European institutions have coped with the consequences of the events of that
decade and
later have been compared with institutional performance in other parts of the world.
There
has been concern about whether traditions and habits amount to institutional
rigidities and
entrenched prejudices. This has continued into the era of Agenda 2000.
In public documents such as Agenda 2000 such concern tends not to be stated explicitly, but can be read between the lines. There is an acknowledgement that the existing institutional framework and allocation of competencies has its limitations in the face of enduring regional diversity and more so the long-term consequences of change of which the events of 1989 and the prospect of Eastern enlargement is one of the most pressing.
The question of competencies - of who does what at each level from the European to the local - remains unsettled as Agenda 2000 is implemented. A reasonable guiding principle is to ask what is the most appropriate level for doing what needs to be done, and allocate resources and responsibilities accordingly. In Agenda 2000, continuing the trend of the last decade or more, the European level has been allocated more of the tasks to do with monitoring outcomes and diminished responsibility for designing, selecting and implementing projects to other levels. But in practice this is not all there is to it. Member States have learnt by experience (and Acceding States can learn from their experience, without having to repeat it themselves) that what is convenient for the Commission may not be congenial for them. The same goes for regions and localities with respect to the national level. Farmers are not the only ones to fear control by others.
While things remain in flux, there is scope for all levels to exercise initiative and a need to avoid the issue going by default. There is a willingness at least to entertain schemes of reform, ideas for new ways of doing things, but more certainty about what is wrong than how to put it right. One direction in which solutions have been sought is the idea of partnerships, the next issue the Seminar discussed.
As the concept has come to be used, in Agenda 2000 as elsewhere, a partnership refers to a quasi-equal association of diverse parties sharing a common interest who commit themselves to work by consensus to achieve agreed goals. The partners may include government departments and non-governmental organisations, public agencies and private enterprises, the European Commission and local communities. The commitment to consensus is intended as a way of avoiding things being forced on one interest by another. If everyone agrees on the direction to go, it does not matter much who 'leads' and each can feel free to proceed in their own way, contributing according to their strengths rather than to an externally prescribed, inflexible plan implemented by a hierarchical chain of command. A partnership is to be co- ordinated rather than controlled, and managed not from in front but from beside if not behind.
Thus conceived, partnerships are a way of circumventing some of the less satisfactory characteristics and consequences of other approaches. Because they proceed integratively, they are alien to and can combat the separatism of the sectoral tradition, promoting 'joined-up thinking' in relation to development. Their division of labour, commitment to consensus, and adaptation to diverse local circumstances make them resistant to and so corrective of authoritarian centrism.
Such at any rate is the theory. In practice most theories tend to work in ways not always envisaged by theorists, especially when they claim novelty compared to what has gone before. So with partnerships. Old attitudes and approaches may be a long time dying, and newly- fledged partners accustomed to the old way of doing things need to learn to use their wings before they can get off the ground, let alone reach for the sky. Some partners may be much more powerful than others due to their access to skilled human resources and matching funding. Frustration as well as resistance can contribute to 'partnership fatigue', when inordinate amounts of time are spent in meetings grappling with the a system that is supposed to avoid institutional complexity.
In promoting partnerships, the Commission was looking for social actors and agents - voluntary organisations, NGOs, unions, private-sector enterprises and commercial firms - to balance both national government and itself. This was a response both to the democratic deficit revealed in the Maastricht treaty ratification referenda, and general concern to increase participation of all kinds and at all levels in community activities. Co-opting diverse economic and social interests as partners in a common enterprise may be seen as a way of addressing both issues. There was the added appeal that using partnerships got round some of the sensitivities of giving public money directly to individuals, entrepreneurs or others.
In the first instance, partnerships are about bringing together those who bring funding and those who bring knowledge and capacity. A major problem with most developmental schemes is that the private economic interests who generate income, and the non- governmental organisations, are too often only marginally involved if not missing altogether: this is true at all levels, from top to bottom. Historically industry has seen itself separate from public agencies and enterprises, and so initially at least has kept its distance from partnerships; if co-opted, there is still a tendency for their representatives to turn up at partnership meetings only once a year. Private and NGO interests often find it hard to justify their engagement due to the direct and indirect cost which such engagement imposes on them.
This is perhaps a legacy of the traditional practice of channelling funds sectorally, when the business was seen as a zero-sum game at which you either won or lost, and it made sense to oppose or block other projects in order to gain approval for one's own. It may also have to do with the age-old disinclination of people with money objecting to have others without money telling them how to spend it, if not spending it for them.
A complication of this is that some partners may not know whether they will be able to contribute financially because their funding is conditional on the approval of other bodies or their success in raising matching-funds. Before other partners are willing to commit themselves firmly, some would like to know whether the various levels of government are willing to allocate public funds to match EU grants. Such knowledge may be late in arriving.
When partnerships were first introduced many people - particularly those accustomed to the sectoral tradition - tended to regard them as just a formality, with the real decisions being taken elsewhere. This attitude needs to be changed if partnerships are to get off the ground. Conducive to this is that each partner has a definite but different role in the partnership. Public-sector partners may contribute via ideas and organisation of the programme, NGOs via specialist knowledge and networks of experienced workers. The private sector can bring proposals for individual projects using knowledge acquired through the market place about what people will actually use; such local knowledge is hard for the public sector to obtain, particularly at regional and national level. Private individuals applying for grants may bring money with them. The voluntary sector brings ideas and applicants but usually not money. So too women's groups and the unemployed, usually neglected by other approaches. The participation of all is more likely the more their general interests and particular wishes are known and recognised by all.
This raises the general problem of representativeness: besides making sure that particular groups of people such as the unemployed, elderly or disabled do not go unrepresented, it is also important to avoid others exerting undue influence through overlapping activities, self-appointment, manipulation of meetings through control of the chair, or control over matching-funding.
Partnerships tend to evolve over time. Initial attitudes may be narrowly selfish or diffusely altruistic, later attitudes the reverse. It is of the nature that their later course and mode of operation is unpredictable at the start. While this makes some traditionalists uneasy because they fear loss of control, others who are newly involved may be enthused by it for the very same reason.
There is a risk that partnerships will prove ephemeral if they are devised in response to a particular funding regime. National government can have a role in making them longer- lasting - perhaps by enabling them to evolve into something else. For example in Scotland the Cairngorms Partnership may become the administration of a future Cairngorms National Park. All partnerships should recognise the need to change with circumstances if they are to survive, or alternatively acknowledge at the start that their term is fixed and make early provision for eventual disbandment.
It would be useful to know what makes partnerships function well or badly, what common obstacles need to be overcome in setting them up and what procedures help them operate smoothly once established. However, such knowledge might not exist or not be readily transferable: particular partnerships may be too closely linked to individual circumstances of time, place and people for there to be general rules.
Be that as it may, the case of the amenities centre in Fermanagh, Northern Ireland is worth considering. On the board were people with a range of complementary skills: a taxation expert, a lawyer, members of the local media, a boat owner, and a range of 'ordinary' people from the locality. This complementarity extended to finance: different partners had access to different sources of finance. Such complementarity led to confidence among the partners about what they wanted to do, and the more confidence there was the less the need to depend on others, including 'experts'. Though consultants were useful sources of advice on what ideas were practical and what were not, the partners decided what to do with it. This confidence was underpinned by the ethos of regularly going back to the people to consult them about proposals, not just to report decisions.
Getting the composition of a partnership right may be as important as deciding its objectives. Broad social representation at local level lent strength in the Fermanagh case. If the partners had been drawn from just one or two agencies or interest groups, such as government officials or farmers, the partnership may well have lacked the social acceptance needed for it to work well.
The successful operation of developmental partnerships presupposes that enough applicants will be forthcoming, projects devised and proposed. If funds are allocated to pre-determined measures, some may well be under-utilised because the number or quality of projects to do with those measures turns out to be small. On the other hand if there are more projects than funds, some from public agencies, some private, some involving NGOs, hard decisions must be made about which to support. Broad participation and perhaps a democratic mandate will be required to give or sustain legitimacy.
If partners who are part of the decision-making process are also applicants who stand to benefit from the way decisions go, particular problems may arise to do with who gets approved and what support is offered. Different sectors tend to have their preferred projects: public-sector agencies favour infrastructure schemes, because that is what they supply, whereas private-sector firms often want training and business support which they cannot supply themselves. There is a risk that the common purpose of the partnership may be undermined, with each partner-applicant tending to regard their allocation as their own capital which others cannot draw on or only with their consent and a quid pro quo, rather than a common pool. In such cases, separation of powers can be a useful safeguard. Different partnerships could prepare programmes, decide which to support, and implement and monitor.
In such considerations, a key question is, 'who is taking the risk?'. This concerns not just who gains if things go right but who loses if they go wrong. The role of banks here is problematic. In the UK banks do not have a good record in selecting which projects to support; they tend to choose people with good security rather than good ideas, particularly at the small end of the scale. They also like to shift risk to the public sector wherever possible, particularly for 'social' rather than 'commercial' projects.
Conclusion
When they work effectively, partnerships can be a way of getting round the
limitations of
individual agents or agencies - the limited knowledge of the market place of the
public sector,
the narrow personal concerns of the private sector, or the sectoral organisation of
the State,
for example. If their base is broad and their collective sense of purpose strong,
they can
engage the interest of a wide range of individuals and interests, and so overcome the
psychological obstacles of unfamiliarity and inertial resistance to change and avoid
the
besetting sin of most developmental schemes, reactionary attitudes that reduce
everything to
getting hold of money.
Much of the their value may derive from indirect consequences. By broadening experience, giving wider scope for the application of existing skills and encouraging the development of new ones, they can help transform the much lamented 'culture' of dependence into one of active independence. By establishing novel linkages across sectors and communities, they can build up networks through which new ideas and good practice may spread to other places and be transferred to other activities. Doing such things collectively and with common purpose can increase both transparency and participation, amounting to a genuine, if informal, democratic gain.
Partnerships have their difficulties, however. Their novelty demands learning to overcome these, which takes time and trouble. To establish a sense of common purpose among many people of diverse and different interests, including limited experience, may take too many meetings that drain the spirit. And even when objectives have been agreed and workable procedures evolved, the temptation to cut corners and court convenience may entrench a new set of habits and attitudes, through which old interests may re-emerge to assert their old baleful influence. Partnerships are no more exempt from the impossibility of perpetual revolution than other regimes and so like them are subject to attrition of familiarity that can dissipate enthusiasm. While this might breed more complacency than contempt, it sets a term to the useful life of many partnerships.
In terms of rural development, partnerships often conceal the reality of unequal power, especially over access to skilled human resources and matching funding. Questions have been raised about the desirability of separating the partnership's responsible for planning and implementing regional/rural development programmes, and avoiding situations where major beneficiaries of programmes compete against each other for funds within a partnership.
These and other problems are reflected in the mixed experiences of Member States with partnerships since they were introduced. They need to be borne in mind by Acceding States trying to get to grips with something of which under their old order they had no experience at all.
In previous enlargements, the Commission had declared itself willing to 'understand' the particular problems of Acceding States. Provided they did not ask for things that involved changing treaties, which takes much time and altogether too much trouble, the Commission was willing to use a range of dodges and devices to find individual solutions: temporary exceptions and adjustment periods; derogations and transitions; perhaps add a new Objective, as with the last enlargement that brought in Finland, Sweden and Austria. Agenda 2000 professes to extend a similar welcome, but with rather more (though unstated) reserve. CEECs, both the five given the official nod of approval and the five who were not, have come to appreciate they need to box clever. But how to do just that? The Commission characteristically says, in SAPARD and elsewhere, "given your present position and existing plans, formulate a strategy to apply for the first few years". But what strategies will, if not 'win', then at least not 'lose'? More positively, given the available time and the circumstances at home and abroad, how to make the most of what is possible?
In pondering such questions, CEECs need to bear some general considerations. Different parties may be operating to different time horizons: CEECs may be thinking long-term; the Commission, especially in negotiations, may be thinking short-term; while Member States may be looking to the next reform of the CAP and the Structural Funds. There may be unequal terms, or at least unequal positions: CEECs must accept all the acquis all at once, whereas Member States have been able to do so over time and after their own fashion. That is the privilege of being an insider: you have a say not just in setting the rules, but also in determining what counts as following them. Reconciling the views of outsiders looking in on the EU and insiders looking out may be more difficult than either is willing to acknowledge. Whether or not the world each inhabits is truly different, it does seem that way, and this impression is not likely to fade in the time it will take to implement Agenda 2000.
As a particular case of how things may work, consider veterinary border controls. They are important to the Commission, the more so nowadays given British BSE and Belgian dioxins, but will be very costly for CEECs to set up and not cheap nor easy to maintain. They do not contribute directly to economic growth in CEECs and take up resources - both funds and people - that could be invested in activities and areas that would produce growth8. Besides, how they work, or fail to work, may provide Member States with convenient excuses to exclude or delay meat products from CEECs access to their domestic markets, and so preserve their advantage or avoid change in their own practices, to the disadvantage and possibly at the expense of CEECs.
Perhaps the primary task facing CEECs is to find out how to make best use of the resources and assistance that will be available in the accession period, and to avoid using them to do things that will not be required or useful after 2006. Knowing what you want is a necessary (though probably not sufficient) condition of a strong negotiating position. Having to ask 'how can I fill in all the details correctly? Please tell me what to do' does not augur well.
Strategies devised under SAPARD must be compatible with the acquis, but this still leaves room for manoeuvre. You can accept all provisions, but actually use only those that fit your strategy and help attain your objectives. Measures and means of implementation can be accepted in principle without thereby committing yourself to use them. Where there are difficulties, you need not challenge the validity of principles; rather, explain why you have practical problems at this time with a particular principle you do not like, and so need to negotiate assistance in applying it at present.
The implementation of other EU policies and frameworks have had different outcomes in different Member States of the EU. It would be handy to know what accounts for these differences, and so it is useful to go looking for explanations in institutions, attitude and interpretation, implementation and organisation.
But these could prove hard to find, in the short run at least, and time is at premium. Given this, an appropriate principle to adopt as a rule of thumb is that there is no universal strategy to follow in planning the implementation of Agenda 2000. Acceding States should therefore devise their own plans according to their own aspirations, needs and priorities, as best they can under their circumstances. The Commission expect this of them as it does of existing Members. The same goes for negotiating accession generally: each Acceding state should follow its own way in the preparatory period. SAPARD is oriented towards agriculture or close to agriculture, but it can be used as a means to achieve some real rural development goals. Rural development means different things at different levels. SAPARD will not solve all problems, but can be used to support national interests. It can be used in developing a strategy, though it does not provide much money to implement it.
However, confining plans to the limits of pre-accession programmes such as SAPARD is a mistake. It is necessary to think beyond their budgetary constraints and time horizons. The Polish government paper Coherent Structural Policy for Agricultural and Rural Development (1999; in English, Aug.99), which is a more detailed exposition of a previous document Medium-term Development Strategy for Agriculture and Rural Areas (April 1998), sets out to do this. Partnerships are useful in thinking more broadly in this way, for they can provide examples of how integrated rural development schemes can be implemented other than via direct subsidies, and can serve wider purposes, such as shaping administrative structures that can help overcome centrist legacies and build local and regional capacity over the long term.
Of direct practical value is to collect detailed information about administrative systems in Member States by talking directly to people who devise and operate them. Detailed acquaintance with how actual partnerships work in different Member States, what has worked and what has not, what has gone wrong and how it was set right, can go some way to compensate for lack of direct experience and so build confidence, both in dealing with other government departments at home and with the Commission. It can also provide an introduction to some of the dark arts of EU infighting: how and when to compromise without losing sight of the original objectives or sense of ultimate purpose; how to distinguish what you want from what you can get in ways that enable you better to disguise the available for the ideal.
Like Member States, each Acceding state has its unique individual problems; they also have problems common to them that Member States do not share. Restitution of property expropriated by the state after World War II is one, what to do about foreign ownership after the constitutional changes since 1989 is another. CEECs generally would benefit from better co-operation among themselves. They can learn from one another by sharing experience, can apply the lessons through twinning with Member States, as mooted by Greece and Bulgaria. Alliances between Acceding States would promote cross-border regional co-operation and might well strengthen their collective position with regard to the Commission. Maybe this report will encourage such efforts.
Alternative strategic considerations: agriculture versus rural development
It is important to distinguish between investment programmes, designed to yield a
continuing
flow of benefits into the future, and subsidised projects, which only get going
because of the
subsidy and keep going only as long as it lasts. Whatever else it might mean,
sustainability
entails 'not dependent on subsidy'.
One general strategy would be to seek small improvements on all fronts, rather than favouring some to the neglect of others in the hope of greater gains. The rationale for this could appeal to economic principle: given their current state of 'underdevelopment', CEECs are operating on the steep part of the marginal return curve, so a small change in input gives a large change in output. Or it could appeal to pragmatic considerations: there is not enough evidence and too much uncertainty to pick winners or avoid losers with any confidence, so it is better to hedge your bets.
An alternative argument is that given the way things are going within the EU and internationally it might well be strategically prudent to seek a good deal on rural development, via negotiating rights to the Structural Funds, rather than on agricultural policy, via price support, on the expectation (or guess, but not just hope) that the former are likely to last and perhaps grow, while the latter is under pressure and is likely to decrease. Thus Hungary might agree to forego agricultural compensation payments in return for more support for rural development measures. It might not then seek to be an Objective I state, nor to negotiate a new Objective as did Finland and Sweden on accession. In Hungary, by one calculation based on long-term regional plans, if out of 6 million ha agricultural cropland, 800 000 ha were to be forested and 500 000 ha become grassland, Hungary could double the funds available to it via Structural Funds and the Rural Development Regulation for rural development
In any event it is hard to say what the world price of agricultural commodities would be in the absence of state subsidies and regulations. Tariff negotiations under the WTO have not, or not yet, made such calculations easier .Therefore it is also hard to say what agricultural practices are or will be competitive. Besides, the Commission may calculate the benefits of a deal not just in terms of lower subsidy payments but also in surpluses avoided by not making compensation payments. The latter may lead to less trouble with quotas, placate WTO and have social and other indirect benefits associated with it.
In most CEECs, big farmers are ostensibly the more efficient ones, but they will suffer most competitive disadvantage from unfavourable agricultural terms. In Poland calculations suggest that if they receive no compensatory payments then they will be unable to compete with farmers from the rest of the EU and will 'die'.
But if Acceding States do not receive compensatory payments, quota allocations, and are not covered by other aspects of the CAP, why should they agree to contribute the same proportion of their VAT receipts to the budget as existing Member States? If there were to be no 'common market' in agriculture and they were to end up anything like net contributors, why bother seeking membership at all?
It is worth noting in this connection that in accession referenda held in Finland and Sweden, farmers there voted 90% against membership. This may well have been because they received a higher level of support from the national government than they would get from the EU. In a CEEC such as Estonia, by contrast, the balance of support is the other way round.
In Romania, where 37% of the population is still engaged in agriculture in some form or other, the government has chosen to allocate more resources to rural development than to agriculture. In part this was done out of necessity because of the threat of trouble in rural areas from ex-miners without alternative employment. But for many years in the past, agriculture supported industry. Nowadays farmers may get limited assistance, such as vouchers for seeds, but they do not receive agricultural production subsidies. There is some government support for marketing and processing, but not for producing. As a legacy from old collective farms, there are associations of producers but these are not expected to last much longer. Given all this there is wondering in some corners of the Ministry of Agriculture about why more complaint has not been heard and indeed about how they are surviving at all.
The position of Estonian farmers bears comparison. One report likened their recent history to a research project to breed a horse that does not need feed. The project was going well and nearly succeeded, but then the horse died.
Acceding States accordingly need to distinguish between two issues: (i) whether by negotiation you can get compensation payments, or some version of them, on agreeable terms; and (ii) what to go for, and what to sacrifice in order to get more of something else, such as support for rural development policy. A relevant strategic consideration would be to analyse the argument that if rural development schemes could be made to work, (ex-) farmers and their families would get jobs on the rural labour market. A viable strategy might be to solve the problem of too many 'inefficient' farmers via that market, rather than the agricultural market, with the bonus that farmers or farm families keep their land and remain in rural areas.
Conclusion
Flexibility is in the interests of all Member States but especially of the
Commission. The
Commission likes to have room to manoeuvre and will make it for itself if it cannot
readily be
found. That is one reason why the theory of the EU and of the Commission (as set out
in the
aquis) tends on occasion not to rule practice, or anyway not too closely.
Member
States know
this, indeed take it for granted; Acceding States need to get used to it, and learn
to take
advantage of it.
Their schooling in this subject may profit from the example of the UK, which was (so it claimed) not native to the culture of 'Europe' either. Its proclivity to high-flown expressions of surprise if not dismay at the suggestion that it is possible to distinguish between a principle construed as fixed and absolute, to be observed to the letter, and the same principle construed as the starting point for negotiation, took up valuable learning time. This could have been put to more productive use, as the earthier approach of Ireland, who acceded at the same time as the UK, perhaps shows.
Besides, the EU responds to pressure when applied appropriately and so is constantly evolving. It does not have an essence that is unchanging amid the flux of events, but rather is just a creature of time and circumstance, an aggregate of responses to issues and occasions. Eastern enlargement is for the EU, more especially for the Commission, a continuation of a familiar process, albeit on a larger scale - rather than the one-off event, unprecedented and never to be repeated, that CEECs may reasonably, given their singular history, conceive it to be.
CEECs should think about what they want and how to get there, no