Policy governance from an autopoietic perspective: revisiting Hungary’s regionalization experience

ABSTRACT

This perspective on Hungary’s post-socialist regional policy governance is informed by an approach that relates region-building and regional governance to social autopoiesis and the self-referential and self-(re)producing nature of social systems such as states. Following debates in regional studies that reflect tensions between the local constitution and external determination of regional governance, we will demonstrate how Hungary has incorporated European Union (EU) policy frameworks through specific appropriations of territorial politics and regional ideas. These appropriations reflect Hungary’s post-socialist transformation not only in terms of responses to global forces, but also as specific spatial practices and regionalization experiences. As we argue, this has in effect resulted in a regionalism without regions – a strategy of Europeanizing territorial politics without creating institutional structures that directly challenge existing power relations. Autopoiesis thus helps explain the resilience of social systems, not only their resistance to institutional change but also their capability to ‘domesticate’ external influences. While criticisms of Hungary’s technocratic and post-political regionalization projects cannot be ignored, our analysis indicates why externally driven intervention in self-organizing governance processes, for example through EU conditionality, has had less impact than expected.

KEYWORDS:

• Regionalization
• Hungary
• European regional policy
• social constructivism
• social autopoiesis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 These anonymized interviews were carried out during 2013 and 2014. The principal aim of the interviews was to detect elements of institutional change and continuity in EU policy implementation and territorial governance.

2 Interview with a former representative of a RDA, June 2013.

3 This is another major observation substantiated by 2014 interviews with former representatives of the National Development Agency as well as new Cohesion Policy managers.

Additional information

Funding

The research is partly based on support provided by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme within the scope of the GRINCOH project (Fostering Cohesion within Central and Eastern Europe) [grant number 290657].