Identification, dissemination and exchange of good practice in local employment development and promoting better governance

IDELE Project

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Seminars

Seminar 9

The new round of Structural and Cohesion Funds: bringing the local into play in the context of convergence

Budapest, Hungary, 9–10 March 2006

View of the Széchenyi lánchíd (Chain Bridge), Budapest.

If the IDELE project is to have any real effect on the way policy is developed and implemented in regions eligible under the Convergence Objective of the new Structural Funds programme, there is a need to demonstrate its relevance in terms of ‘here and now’ activities and the key issues that they will face. The Budapest seminar needs to explore how best to make a persuasive case for the application of local employment development (LED) approaches, not in terms of some relatively abstract idea that it is a good thing in general, but that it is a specific tool to address problems that are prominent on the national policy agenda overall.

Since we already know that in almost all the beneficiary countries policy-making is highly centralised, it is at the level of the central ministries that the case for LED needs first to be made. To be effective we need to have a grasp of the top policy concerns of central players in the Member States and then to go on to take a view on how an LED approach can help them deliver their objectives.

Put another way, we need to find out what kinds of high profile problems in a given country will best draw down LED as a solution.

The history of LED in the EU15 already tells us that the strongest pull for local action in practical policy came from the ability of ‘locally sensitive’ approaches to tackle unemployment and social exclusion. Much of the best practice that IDELE has identified started out from situations where local players were committed to tackling spatially localised problems of intractable unemployment and the social exclusion that resulted from it. Other forms of value added subsequently sprung out of this—filling local service gaps, supporting enterprise and entrepreneurship, the provision of community facilities and so on but the initial trigger came from LED as a way to tackle multiple deprivation—where many gaps accumulated on top of each other in a situation of high unemployment and the lack of the income needed to promote and sustain normal services. When we come to the new member states of the EU, IDELE needs to remember the roots of LED from a decade ago and start again to make the policy case. One key question for Budapest is, then, “What are the best features of LED as an instrument for dealing with pockets of unemployment and social exclusion in the Convergence Objective countries and what policy frameworks are needed to seed and embed it?”

The differential needs of urban and rural areas under conditions of economic and social transition points to a second key issue likely to fall out from an analysis of national policy priorities. For the urban context we can again recover the early successes of LED in helping to rebuild a sense of purpose and civic pride in those parts of cities and conurbations that captured the blight of the development process rather than its fruits. Local neighbourhood partnerships have become a normal part of the urban scene in most such environments in the EU15 (with some national exceptions mainly in the south). The ability of these to have a far wider effect than in terms of just job creation has been critical especially where there are issues of low social attachment as a product of in- and out-migration and the churning of people (see the IDELE Berlin Report). Such neighbourhood-based partnerships have also been sources of social economy and social enterprise approaches to finding quasi-state plus quasi-market solutions that can give young and old a stake in civil society while offering the prospect of some level of wage income. These will chiefly be the subject for our Bologna seminar and we shall return to the subject in the next section.

It is the impact of the transition on rural areas where we expect to find many of the most pressing issues for the Convergence Objective countries. The issue here is less likely to be identified as unemployment (though it is surely that) but more as under-employment and a lack of the learning and skills base needed to find a route into work. Once again, we can turn to an impressive LED track record. The whole filiere of activity that has spun out under LEADER is a classic example of where local actions can come into play to blunt the sharpest edges of change as rural areas undergo transformation. We shall be dealing with this as a specific topic in the Santiago seminar but at Budapest we will be looking for good practice examples of any kind in developing local policy to support the transformation of rural areas.

The Budapest seminar has an important mission to perform. It needs to find a successful way to bring Local Employment Development to the right audience in the Convergence Objective countries and regions and at the same time position it as an essentially practical policy tool capable of adding value in dealing with the most pressing problems.

Seminar documents

Examples of good practice

Seminar presentations

Seminar photographs

Photographs of the seminar in Budapest.

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