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Abstract
Over the last two decades, the role of the EU can be considered highly important in advancing institutional reforms and overall development in Estonia. The article focuses on Estonian regional policy (RP) and analyses whether it has gone through Europeanization (i.e. convergence with EU regulations and values, or followed its own development path). The institutional cycle model of territorial governance is used for establishing the analytical framework. The research was largely carried out as a second-person action research and used interviews over the period of 1990–2011. The article concludes that Estonian RP shows considerable dynamics as public and political support to RP, administrative structures and policy tools have changed. Europeanization of Estonian RP was most visible in 1994–1998, when an institutional framework was created, in parallel with intensive learning from the West. Overall, in 1999–2004 the application of EU cohesion policy tools took place with significant convergence. After joining the EU in 2004, national RP programmes were reduced, the institutional framework was frozen and a selective application of EU rules and the use of EU cohesion policy measures for achieving some personal political agendas started, driving Estonian RP away from common European values.
Acknowledgements
We thank all interviewees and our special thanks go to the officials of the Ministry of Interior and Enterprise Estonia who generously supported us with recent data and gave very proficient comments. We are also grateful for the constructive comments of the two anonymous referees.
This research has been supported by the European Social Fund through the Estonian Research and Innovation Policy Monitoring Programme and co-funded by the Target Funding Project No. SF0180052s07 “Factors influencing spatial mobility of population and the impact on the regional development” of the Ministry of Education and Research of Estonia and by the Estonian Science Foundation (grant ETF8423).