Europeanisation of interest intermediation in the Central and Eastern European member states: contours of a mixed model

ABSTRACT

The article analyses the effects of the EU on practices of interest intermediation in four Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states. It zooms in on the practical implementation of the EU partnership principle for the European Structural and Investment Funds as a requirement that prescribes a certain mode of interest intermediation. The article captures the state and evolution of practices of partnership and argues that a specific variety of partnership between the state and societal actors has emerged in the countries under scrutiny. Actors on the ground have actively engaged with the EU model of partnership, reinterpreted and adjusted it to the local conditions, thus producing a mixed model. The model is characterised by less institutionalised and formalised interactions between state and societal actors and actors’ normative orientation to transparency as the main benefit and purpose of partnership.

KEYWORDS:

• The EU
• Europeanisation
• interest intermediation
• partnership principle
• civil society
• CEE member states

1. Introduction

How does European integration affect practice and patterns of interest intermediation in European Union (EU) member states? Over the years, the EU has come up with a number of rules and requirements, both more and less legally strict, which explicitly prescribe a certain format, procedures, and normative understandings of relations between state and societal actors. However, despite rich academic literature on Europeanisation as the EU impact on domestic political institutions and actors, there is still very little knowledge about the overall effects of the EU model of state–society relations that is being imposed through certain EU requirements. Additionally, despite Central and Eastern European (CEE) member states being the main and sometimes the only case of Europeanisation research, the question how the EU affects state–society relations in these member states is rarely researched. The literature on Europeanisation of civil society and interest groups partially fills the gap in our knowledge of EU impact, yet it often concludes that there is a very limited EU effect, if any, largely due to the inherent weakness of societal actors (Borzel and Buzogany 2010; Iankova 2004; Piattoni 2006). Surprisingly, few scholars explore how state–society relations change as a result of EU membership in CEE member states.

The ambition of this article is to make a step in the direction of answering this question by exploring the peculiarities of practical implementation of the EU partnership principle for European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) in four CEE member states – Hungary, Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia. Partnership has been chosen as a good case for investigating how the EU triggers changes in interest intermediation practices. First, the concept is believed to convey a certain EU approach to interest intermediation and inclusion of societal actors. This approach is becoming more popular and “travels” from cohesion policy to other policy areas such as environment, maritime and fisheries, and the Neighbourhood. Moreover, in 2014, the partnership principle was codified in a delegated legal act – the European Code of Conduct on partnership. Second, given wide scope and political salience of cohesion policy in the CEE context, implementation of partnership is believed to have a visible spill-over effect as actors may apply their experiences, knowledge, and understandings of working together elsewhere outside the realm of cohesion policy.

Analytically, the article departs from a well-known top-down definition of Europeanisation as

a process involving, a) construction, b) diffusion and c) institutionalisation of formal and informal rules, procedures, policy paradigms, styles, “ways of doing things” and shared beliefs and norms which are first defined and consolidated in the EU policy process and then incorporated in the logic of domestic (national and subnational) discourse, political structures and public choices. (Radaelli 2003, 30)

In an exploratory manner, it seeks to capture the extent of diffusion and institutionalisation of the practices of interest intermediation, defined at the EU level and sent to the member states in the form of legal or normative requirements, with a view to identifying the degree of “incorporation” as put by Radaelli (2003). The principal point of departure is the assumption that the partnership principle communicates a specific idea or a mode of state–society relations imposed by the EU. In analytical terms, this mode has two dimensions, namely: (1) the institutional one or, in other words, a set of requirements regarding how interactions between actors should be structured in terms of the scope of inclusion and institutional/procedural formats; and (2) the normative one or the normative idea of the purpose of interactions. Through this particular analytical angle, the present article distances itself from the growing literature on partnership implementation that is concerned with either specific renditions of territorial or regional consequences of partnership in cohesion policy or overall success or failure of partnership as such (Dabrowski 2013; Potluka and Liddle 2014). The ambition of the article is to trace emergence and evolution of practices of partnership implementation across four countries and along the above-mentioned two dimensions in order to evaluate the degree of EU-induced change. This exploratory exercise also aims provide a preliminary discussion of the factors behind this change that can serve as a starting point for further research.

Drawing on 90 interviews with the main actors involved in partnership implementation conducted over the period of four years, the article argues that a specific hybrid model of partnership has emerged across four countries. A detailed examination of how the main challenges of the partnership implementation – its scope of inclusion and access, institutional and procedural formats, and purposes of interactions – have been taken, contested, and solved by actors highlights several observations. On the one hand, the hybrid model that has emerged is distinguished by the presence of inherent features of the EU model of partnership, namely centrality of formal institutionalised interactions with organised civil society for the purpose of expertise provision and legitimisation. On the other hand, this EU model has been adjusted to local conditions through the incorporation of local understandings of partnership. In particular, partnership is practiced equally through more and less formal and more and less loosely institutionalised interactions without a strict emphasis on interactions with organised civil society or representativeness of societal actors, as would be expected by the EU. Additionally, the EU understanding of the main purpose of partnership has also been modified. In particular, the EU understanding of legitimacy, as one of the benefits of partnership, has been translated and clarified on the ground. Actors in CEE member states prioritise throughput legitimacy achieved as a result of greater transparency of the process of ESIF allocation, scrutiny over the money use, and communicating policy principles to the public rather than input or output legitimacy.

In making this argument, the article first discusses how the existing literature answers the question about EU impact on national patterns of interest intermediation. It then proceeds with a brief excursus into the history of partnership and a brief discussion of the analytical framework, and research design and methods, and, finally, summarises the results of the empirical analysis.

2. Europeanisation of interest intermediation

The literature on interest groups and civil society in the EU context is structured around several major themes. Among them are the impact of the EU on the demography of interest groups and civil society actors, their organisational practices and strategies and decisions to reorient their activities to the EU level or domestic actors’ “usages of Europe” (Berkhout and Lowery 2010; Kriesi, Tresch, and Jochum 2007; Quittkat and Kotzian 2011; Sanchez Salgado 2014). On the other hand, scholars of European civil society ask how the actors defined as representing civil society contribute to democracy and legitimacy of the EU and EU policy-making (Liebert and Trenz 2009; Warleigh 2001).

Looking at the EU impact on domestic actors, scholars of Europeanisation do not circumvent the question how the EU membership impacts modes and formats of interest intermediation at the national level. Most of the analysis concentrates on establishing how the EU mode of interest intermediation affects domestic patterns and produces convergence or any variation and, if so, what accounts for this variation. Framed and explained in terms such as convergence/divergence, the scholarly findings are controversial and very often mutually exclusive. The same EU patterns of interest intermediation, identified as quasi-pluralistic, are found to be both fitting and not fitting the practices in the same countries, as argued by Schmidt (1999) and Cowles (2001). Guided by the same hypothesis of the degree of fit, Falkner and Leiber (2004), for instance, find that even though some EU member states such as Denmark, Austria, and Sweden are considered to be almost textbook cases of corporatism, the influence of the corporatist-like EU mode of interest intermediation in the area of social policy would be very uneven and only modest convergence can be found.

The literature on industrial relations is also inconclusive about convergence/divergence, though it leans towards the argument of divergence and persistence of national traditions (Vos 2006). Research on Europeanisation of industrial relations has produced a diversity of findings mainly due to diverse and generally more careful conceptualisations as to what gets Europeanised – wage bargaining, practices of social partnership, sectoral bargaining, or final outcomes of these processes (Glassner and Pusch 2013; Marginson, Sisson, and Arrowsmith 2003; Tsarouhas 2008). However, even at this level of conceptual sophistication, existing research produces sometimes radically different conclusions about potential convergence of industrial relations across member states.

In an attempt to reflect on existing conceptual and analytical tools, scholars have discussed several pitfalls of this overall line of reasoning and ways out of the impasse created by it. Obviously, the lack of clarity regarding the contours of the EU model itself is partially responsible for the described confusion. As argued by Eising (2008), there has never been much scholarly consensus about whether the EU model can, in principle, be defined as corporatist or pluralist, which affects further conceptual work on the implications of this model. While Streeck and Schmitter (1991) describe the EU model as lacking corporatist features, Schmidt makes a point about its quasi-pluralist character whereas Kohler-Koch (2006) makes a well-known argument about its network character. On the other hand, as argued by Falkner (2000), controversial findings are produced by a strategy of looking at member states as units of analysis and the country level as a level of analysis. Instead, she proposes to change the analytical focus to the meso-level of sector-specific patterns of interest intermediation. Such a shift allows for a more variegated impact of the EU model rather than a dichotomous divergence/convergence outcome.

It comes as a surprise that there is very little research on Europeanisation of interest intermediation in the CEE member states, although the literature on Europeanisation of this part of the continent and the EU impact on interest groups is rich (Cisar and Navratil 2015; Dimitrova 2010; Fink-Hafner 1998; Hughes, Sasse, and Gordon 2004). Drawing on the concept of multi-level governance (MLG) as a specific configuration of decision-making powers and competences at the regional level, Bruszt (2008) and Andreou and Bache (2010) try to evaluate whether MLG actually emerged in CEE countries as a result of implementation of the EU cohesion policy. Scholars arrive at a conclusion that, first, the existing pattern of interest intermediation characterised by strong dominance and power of central authorities has been challenged “on the margins” by the EU requirements and, second, that there is some kind of cross-country variation in the extent of such “layering” or marginal changes without transformation of existing mode of governance (Bruszt 2008, 620). Some attention to the EU influence on domestic patterns is paid by the literature on industrial relations and social dialogue (Iankova and Turner 2004; Iankova 2007; Perez-Solorzano Borragan 2004, 2006). Perez-Solorzano Borragan (2006) claims that a new system of interest intermediation has emerged in CEE countries and is characterised by specific dynamics of information ownership and exchange. Iankova (2007) argues that the EU accession process has resulted in entrenchment of corporatist traditions of tripartite cooperation across the region, a thesis challenged in the political economy literature (Bohle and Greskovits 2012). Although highly informative, the above-mentioned studies avoid generalisation by focusing on interest intermediation in narrow segments – at the regional level or between capital labour and the state – and are inconclusive about the cross-country divergence/convergence pattern.

The literature on Europeanisation of civil society does not help to fill these gaps because of lack of a systematic research on overall trajectories of Europeanisation of modes of cooperation with civil society actors in the CEE member states. A few studies have addressed how the EU influenced opportunities for civil society actors by requiring their involvement in the implementation of EU acquis and providing other resources (Borzel and Buzogany 2010; Borzel 2010b). Other studies looked at how civil society actors from CEE adapt to new opportunities at the EU level (Pleines 2010).

The lack of analysis is puzzling given the amount of time after accession, which makes it possible to assess the effects of the EU on national systems of interest intermediation. It is also surprising given that throughout these years, the EU has insisted on the full application of the so-called partnership principle, its flagship requirement that brings together state and societal actors for the purpose of implementation of EU cohesion policy. There are several reasons why partnership is the most promising case to test the hypothesis about Europeanisation of interest intermediation. First, the concept of partnership communicates the idea of “close cooperation” between the state authorities and main categories of societal actors – social partners (associations of capital and labour) and civil society organisations (CSOs) – in the course of the design, implementation, and monitoring over allocation of Structural Funds, the main financial instrument of cohesion policy. Partnership, thus, appears to be a requirement that brings together representatives of practically all types of interests across all levels (national and regional), which makes it possible to overcome the overly narrow focus of existing studies that look at patterns of interactions between the authorities and one particular type of societal actor (associations of labour or capital, for instance) or exclusively at the regional level. Second, partnership is one of the central principles of cohesion policy implementation, a policy that cuts across various policy areas and fields – social policy, environment, transport, infrastructure, education, etc. The partnership principle applies to all stages and all thematic aspects of cohesion policy implementation, which extends its potential transformative effect on interest intermediation in various policy sectors. Finally, the novelty of partnership as a mode of interactions between state authorities and societal interests in CEE member states makes it possible to trace its transformative effect in the context where no deeply entrenched traditions of interest intermediation are believed to exist.

The next section introduces the analytical framework for the study of the transformative effects of partnership on the practices of interest intermediation in CEE member states.

3. Analytical framework

A small but growing body of literature on practical implementation of partnership addresses the question of success or failure of this requirement yet provides quite an unequivocal answer to the question whether partnership experience leaves any imprint on domestic patterns of interest intermediation. Framing their questions in analytical terms of success or failure similar to the dichotomy of fit/misfit in Europeanisation scholarship, scholars often equate failure with zero impact. Equally, contested implementation of partnership, registered in some studies, would also be equated with a failure and, consequently, zero impact (Bache and Olsson 2001; Demidov 2016; Piattoni 2009).

The present article argues that such gaps in our knowledge about the transformative effects and impact of partnership are functions of several analytical choices and strategies used to study partnership implementation. First, scholars are preoccupied with establishing whether partnership implementation is essentially a success or failure, so the empirical reality on the ground is expected to be one of these options. However, apart from adding little to our understanding of how partnership affects existing practices of interest intermediation, this strategy discards empirical evidence that does not fit into some abstract binary models of success or failure. Second, existing studies approach partnership as either a number of institutional requirements to actors’ interactions or a number of normative ideas about these interactions. As a result, an important point is missed – that partnership is a requirement that brings both together and, consequently, that this complexity affects its implementation.

The article addresses these three analytical pitfalls. First, it applies a bottom-up approach of inductive exploration of the practices of partnership on the ground rather than deductive testing of any hypotheses formulated in advance. Second, it operationalises partnership as a requirement that brings together two closely interlinked dimensions, namely (1) the institutional dimension ((a) scope of access and inclusion and (b) institutional/procedural formats of interactions) and (2) the normative dimension of ((c) purpose of partnership interactions).

Analysis of the scope of inclusion presupposes answering the questions about who is included in and has access to these interactions. The literature on interest intermediation refers to two major ideal types of interactions – corporatism and pluralism (Streeck and Schmitter 1991). The main distinction between the two is how the problem of access is solved. In corporatism, societal actors are limited to those officially recognised as nation-wide representatives of various interests. In pluralism, access is equally granted to the whole population of interest groups. Analysis of the procedural format brings attention to the procedural principles, formats of interactions, and working methods. The literature on collaborative governance refers to working methods as modes of communication between actors and decision-making, stressing such dimensions as formality/informality and deliberation/bargaining (Fung 2006). Finally, the last constitutive element of modes of interactions, and the most challenging for conceptualisation, is their purpose. The academic literature, including the one on European civil society and interest groups, points to two major rationales behind involvement of societal actors – legitimacy and efficiency (Liebert and Trenz 2009). These concepts are taken as primary orientations for analysis of how actors construct purpose of interactions.

3.1. Research design, methods, and data

This article builds on the empirical data on implementation of the partnership principle in four countries collected in the period between 2011 and 2014. Implementation of partnership may include a variety of distinct processes, and the existing literature does not invest in conceptual bordering between these processes. For the purposes of this article, any instance or episode of interactions between the state and societal actors in the context of cohesion policy-making, be it at the stage of programming, project selection and allocation, monitoring, or evaluation is seen as implementation of partnership.

The method of semi-structured interviewing was used as the main method of empirical data collection along with close readings of policy documents such as the minutes and protocols of meetings of the Monitoring Committees (MCs), research reports produced by actors themselves (especially CSOs and social partners), government reports and position papers on implementation of partnership, and involvement of societal actors in the cohesion policy-making process. The actors were identified primarily using the lists of members of the MCs, government websites of the offices and departments dealing with EU cohesion policy, government reports on policy input provided by societal partners, and recommendations of the respondents themselves. The sample of actors for interviewing was constructed bearing in mind the challenge of multiplicity of actors, multi-level character of partnership interactions, and multiplicity of policy areas. First, both capital-based and regional actors were selected in the four countries (actors from at least one NUTS 2 region in every country). Second, interviews were conducted with representatives of at least two sub-groups within each of three larger categories, namely employees of the Managing Authorities and line ministries in the case of the state officials, representatives of labour (trade unions and professional associations) and capital (employers’ associations and chambers of commerce) in the case of social partners, and representatives of umbrella association and smaller “individual” organisations in the case of CSOs. The challenge of multiplicity of policy areas was addressed by interviewing actors working in partnership across two major policy areas – social inclusion and environment as covered by relevant Operational Programmes (OPs), most often special OPs on social inclusion and environment. Altogether, the sample included 90 respondents from the four countries. Importantly, actors were selected through the method of purposive sampling, based on their relevance for the research questions rather than as representatives of a larger population. Despite data collection taking place between 2011 and 2014, the sample included actors also involved in partnership across all three programming periods: 2004–2006, 2007–2013, and 2014–2020. This allowed the research to capture the evolution of partnership practices over time.

For each type of actor, interviewees in positions of authority (heads of units for the state officials, general secretaries for CSOs, or policy officers for social partners) were identified. The main selection criteria were personal experience of participating in partnership arrangements such as membership in the MCs and/or participation in consultations or working groups. The interviews were conducted in English, both in the countries under study and over phone/Skype, and lasted between 45 and 90 minutes. The respondents were asked two groups of open-ended questions during interviews, ones that cover the actor’s real experiences with partnership in terms of forms and methods of involvement of their organisations, and questions about their perceptions of partnership practices. The transcribed texts of the interviews were coded according to relevant recurrent themes across the interviews (Richards 2005).

4. The partnership principle – features of the EU model

There is little consensus in the literature on whether any distinct EU model of interest intermediation exists or can be distinguished and whether “EU interest intermediation displays system-wide traits or if it forms a patchwork of different modes” (Eising 2008, 1166). This article argues that the EU partnership principle can be seen as a specific mode of interest intermediation in cohesion policy. It traces how partnership evolved along the three above-discussed dimensions of (a) scope of access, (b) institutional/procedural formats, and (c) purpose through reconstructing its history as a legal requirement and the history of the main debates around it.

Partnership was officially introduced by the European Commission in 1988 as one of the main innovations of the EU cohesion policy reform. The new Regulations were prescribed to involve regional and local authorities in the member states in the allocation process. The Regulations make one short reference to the institutional format of partnership and prescribe setting up the MCs, the structures that have been the main institutional manifestations of partnership until the present day. Interestingly, the regulations refer to partnership as “consultations”, yet do not specify their formats or procedures. Most importantly, in terms of scope, only regional and local governmental actors were defined as partners.

Scholars point to two major justifications of the purpose of partnership. On the one hand, partnership was promoted by the European Commission as a way to disburse ESIF more efficiently, especially in light of the enlargement in 1985 and the ensuing growth of the cohesion policy budget. The “old” member states became concerned about efficiency of the ESIF disbursement and quickly backed the European Commission in its quest for introducing more scrutiny through partnership, which was “sold” as a way of ensuring more efficient allocations through accessing expertise possessed by other actors (Bache 2010). On the other hand, the European Commission was advancing partnership, driven by the idea of social cohesion as a counterbalance to the neoliberal agenda of the single market (Hooghe 1998). Involvement of regional and local governmental actors was thus seen as a way of balancing neoliberal aspirations of central governments and of ensuring more economic and social cohesion.

Another reform of the cohesion policy and changes in framing of partnership occurred in 1993. The main innovation was the expansion of the circle of partners. The regulations of 1993 prescribed involvement of so-called social partners or traditional associations of capital and labour. Thus, social partners took part in the process of ESIF allocation from 1993 as members of MCs. The regulations also introduced an important disclaimer that never left the debates on partnership ever since, namely the provision that partnership should be practiced “within the framework of each Member State’s national rules and current practices and in full compliance with the respective institutional, legal and financial powers of each of the partners” (Official Journal L 193:5 31 July 1993).

Some scholars have shown that the implementation of cohesion policy after 1993 was still not unproblematic, as the inclusion of social partners was strongly contested by the national authorities, especially in the member states with weak traditions of corporatist policy-making (Bache 2010). At the same time, a larger trend in understanding of partnership was developing. Hooghe (1998), for instance, concludes that a “shift from uniform territorial partnership among three partners to a looser collaboration involving a variety of actors and tailored to national circumstances” was occurring in the mid-1990s (471). The European Commission increasingly started framing partnership in participatory terms and as an instrument of improving political participation rather than an instrument of territorial development. This political orientation became fully visible with the decision to stretch the category of “partners” further and include CSOs working on issues of gender equality and environmental protection. The amendments of 2003 went even further and extended partnership to “the competent regional, local, urban and other public authorities; economic and social partners; any other body representing civil society, environmental partners, non-governmental organisations, and bodies responsible for promoting equality between men and women” (Official Journal L 158:3 28 June 2003).

Most importantly, there was a noticeable reframing of the objectives of partnership. A special emphasis was placed on “enhanced legitimacy”. In its report on partnership during the 1999–2006 programming period, the European Commission stressed that “participation of civil society helps to legitimize the decision-making process by counterbalancing any political or other influence” (European Commission 2005). While this move did not totally downgrade the importance of efficiency concerns, it certainly added a new dimension to debates about partnership. This linking of partnership and civil society participation with legitimacy became even more prominent during the process of enlargement when application of partnership was clearly a part of democratic conditionality (Borzel 2010a).

The discourse of efficiency returned to the agenda in the course of preparation for the new 2014–2020 programming period, and can be explained by a re-discovery of the so-called place-based approach that emphasised channelling of expertise, better evaluation, management, and evidence-based allocation (Mendez, Bachtler, and Wishlade 2013). The newly adopted European Code of Conduct on Partnership reflects these changes by stressing the decisive role of partnership in improved management of the ESIF, namely better evaluation and project selection. However, the EU concerns related to representation and participation did not disappear but have become even more pronounced. The Code especially stresses representation and mentions that “the partners selected should be the most representative of the relevant stakeholders” and that “specific attention should be paid to including groups who may be affected by programs but who find it difficult to influence them” (European Commission 2014). Representativity, thus, appears as one of the main selection criteria for identification of the right partner.

This brief historical excursus into the history of partnership helps one to distinguish the main features of the EU mode of collaboration with societal actors. When it comes to the scope of partnership, several features come to the front. First, the European Commission explicitly refers to three main groups of actors – regional and local authorities, social partners, and CSOs. Second, representativity of actors is stressed as the main criterion of selection. These two features confirm a strong orientation of the European Commission to dealing with the organised civil society, a point widely discussed in the literature (Armstrong 2002, 2006). As for the procedural format of partnership, a preference for an institutionalised dialogue can also be detected. The MCs are the most meticulously described structures of partnership and can be seen as its principal institutional means, although the regulations leave much space for experimentation with possible forms and formats. Finally, how the European Commission defines the purpose of partnership is less clear although two principal orientations can be detected, namely efficiency and legitimacy with a clear orientation towards output legitimacy.

5. EU partnership in CEE member states: the contours of the hybrid model

The present section summarises the results of an empirical inquiry on the effects of the identified EU model of partnership on practices of its implementation in four CEE member states. It builds on the argument that partnership is a manifestation of the particular EU model of interest intermediation and traces which elements of this model entrenched in the countries under study.

5.1. Scope of access

The implementation of partnership was a part of the EU democratic conditionality as a requirement to ensure inclusion of societal actors in policy-making and a part of more specific negotiations on the so-called Chapter 21 (“Regional policy and structural measures”) that was solely related to cohesion policy implementation. However, perhaps, the main peculiarity of partnership policies in CEE countries was that these future members were confronted with the already most extended version of partnership in terms of its scope. The European Commission demanded involvement of all types of actors mentioned in the regulations, namely the regional and local authorities, social partners, and CSOs. Attempts to comply with this demand have led to emergence, transformation, and entrenchment of certain practices.

As recalled by the respondents in all four countries, especially state officials, partnership was a novelty. The state officials, especially ones representing lower-rank cohesion policy implementers such as the departments in the line Ministries, recall that they did not have any prior experience that they would use as a guiding principle. For partnership implementation, this meant the period of active experimentalism with solving the main problem – whom to involve? The empirical data show that this problem was solved in two different ways across all four countries, and two different groups of practices gradually emerged and replaced each other throughout three cohesion policy cycles – 2004–2006, 2007–2013, and 2014–present.

The problem of the scope of partnership was solved in a particular way during the periods of 2004–2006 and 2007–2013. The major peculiarity was the decision of state officials in the four countries to opt for a wide inclusion. In practice, this meant unlimited access to all interested groups and actors who felt like providing any input into the drafts of the main cohesion policy documents – National Strategic Reference Framework, which was later replaced with the Partnership Agreements between the European Commission and a member state, and OPs. Providing such access to the wider public and ensuring unproblematic flow of input from actors required special means and tools. This difficulty was resolved through uploading the drafts of all the policy documents on the internet and collecting all comments, suggestions, and remarks on their content. The partnership across all four countries was, thus, an exercise in nation-wide participation of all interested and affected parties.

There was one difference in practical implementation of this inclusive participation ideal between Hungary and three other countries. While the state officials in Poland, Slovenia, and Slovakia followed the letter of the regulations quite literally and tried to limit participation to formally organised partners, Hungarian state officials allowed anyone, including individuals and loosely organised grassroots groups and collectives, to comment on the contents of programmes and supply any suggestions as to how the ESIF could be spent. The major implication of this almost direct democracy experiment was a huge input provided by the Hungarian public during the programming for the 2007–2013 period. Hungarian state officials remained faithful to the idea of wide access and replied to more than 4000 comments with explanations of how the comments were taken or, conversely, rejected, including sending personal letters to individuals who provided input. Interestingly, the Hungarian example was labelled “the best practice” by the Directorate General Regional Policy, which, for some time, strengthened state officials’ convictions that this was the best solution to the problem of access.

The empirical data show two reasons behind the decisions of state officials across the four countries to opt for unlimited access. As put by the respondents, the lack of necessary policy input or knowledge about the areas and problems that require ESIF interventions was naturally one of the main factors that influenced their decision (“we expect them to show the fields which need to be covered and that we do not see”,¹ “we need to collect the right priorities”²). On the other hand, state officials were not only driven by instrumental considerations in their attempt to reach the wider public; they also saw partnership as a way of solving the problem of legitimacy. This legitimacy gap was produced by noticeable separation between the higher level of cohesion policy-making or the intergovernmental bargain about the size of the ESIF money envelope and the lower level of actual spending. State officials representing the latter category of cohesion policy implementers, thus, found themselves in a situation of no mandate from the public to make important decisions (“those who plan the programmes need to have decisions made by politicians … but there were no decisions, we were given ‘growth and jobs’”³). Thus, unlimited access and incorporation of as many “partners” into the process of collection of policy input were seen as the most convenient way of solving both problems.

Interestingly, the same solution of the scope of partnership was applied to formation of the MCs. Across all four countries, although to a lesser extent in Slovenia and Poland, state officials opened the MCs to anyone willing to participate. The result was that at some point in Hungary and Slovakia the MCs for the OPs on Environment, Rural Development, and Social Inclusion were composed of more than 70 partners and became bodies representing a very diverse set of partners, including international non-governmental organisations such as World Wide Fund for Nature or Transparency International, and a wide variety of professional associations some of which did not belong to any nation-wide network. In Poland, various representatives of church and education and science were invited to become members of the MCs, which reflected the specificity of local understanding of wide inclusion. In Slovakia, the emphasis was placed on inclusion of professional associations such as associations of information technology (IT) companies, hospitals, and municipalities. Slovenia, in fact, was the first country to break with the practice of wide access. Partnership for the programming for 2007–2013 was already implemented through different access mechanisms, namely systems of self-nomination and self-selection run by CSOs.

By the middle of the 2007–2013 programming period, a shift to a principally different practice of partnership in terms of access and inclusion occurred. Despite the “big” programming being over, consultations with partners were required for drafting of Action Plans, more concrete pieces of the OPs. However, partners’ involvement at this stage was ensured through different means. State officials across the four countries opted for the practice of public consultations, narrower in scope and more targeted than previously applied nation-wide consultations. The most distinct feature of this practice is its pre-arranged character and a limited circle of actors invited to participate. In practice, that implied informing a limited number of partners about an upcoming consultation and meeting the ones who decided to take part in it.

The principal criterion for selection used by the state officials was the unspecific one of “relevance”. The departments dealing with Structural Fund implementation in the Managing Authorities across four countries, the structures established for overall coordination of cohesion policy, composed the lists of relevant partners, as recalled by the respondents. Basically, these were the lists of all formally registered organisations whose activities would allow them to be classified as either a social partner or a CSO. Thus, formal registration for partners served as an entry ticket to partnership. However, by the beginning of 2014–2020 programming, the centrality of this criterion was undermined by the growing importance of representativeness as the criterion of inclusion. State officials revised the previous approach and, as recalled by representatives of CSOs, they immediately felt the change when certain organisations were suddenly not invited to take part in any consultations. This move occurred partially due to the insistence of the European Commission on representativeness and penetration of this discourse into the debates on partnership and partially due to pragmatic take of the state officials themselves who were experiencing difficulties with identifying partners.

The selection into the MCs also changed. The state authorities allowed partners, especially CSOs, to mobilise and establish their own systems of nomination and selection of partners into the MCs. The practice immediately became very popular in all four countries, partially because it allowed to structure and channel conflict among CSOs themselves seeking becoming members of the MCs. In Slovenia, CNVOS, the biggest national umbrella association, established such a system; in Poland, Hungary, and Slovakia coalitions of the biggest CSOs took control over the process.

The empirical data show that the problem of scope of partnership was resolved in a mixed manner in all countries. On the one hand, state officials in the member states visibly complied with the requirement to recognise organised civil society as a partner and soon drifted away from their understanding of unlimited participation of the public. Additionally, they used representativeness as a selection criterion in order to resolve dilemmas of whom to include. On the other hand, the emerged practice of partners’ selection – the targeted invitations of certain partners to pre-arranged public consultations – represents a compromise between the mode imposed by the EU and local needs. The next section develops this argument further by analysing the procedural formats of partnership that emerged in the CEE countries.

5.2. Procedural formats of partnership

Taking stock of the existing procedural formats of partnership helps to better understand where the mixed nature of the emerging system is situated. The EU Regulations have always been extremely vague about any procedural formats and only referred to the MCs. It is argued that this vagueness provided ample room for actors’ interpretations and also allowed actors to experiment with possible formats of interactions. The resulting outcome is a dual system of formal and informal interaction. Actors use formally organised interactions (public consultations and the MCs) for information and exchange and opinion-sharing on general and widely formulated cohesion policy priorities, revision, and amendments. The informal interactions are used for specification and concretisation of these priorities – operationalisation of measurements, definition of indicators, and criteria for project selection. Both formats are tilted towards different groups of partners and are meant to serve different functions – transparency, scrutiny, and evaluation, in the first case, and knowledge and evidence exchange, in the second.

The format of closed public consultations organised with a limited number of partners replaced previously widely practiced nation-wide open consultations. It can be argued that this happened due to both learning on the part of the state officials about mechanics of priority definition or identification of areas for ESIF interventions, and because of pressure from societal actors to structure hitherto unstructured communication. This format is naturally used at early stages of programming when the content of future OPs is being determined. In essence, the purpose of the consultations is to define general policy priorities and overall thematic and spending directions. However, starting from 2007, the procedural dynamics of the consultations have changed. If previously these meetings would be held according to the principle “first – policy input, second – draft of an OP”, this principle later changed to “first –draft of an OP, second – comments and remarks”.⁴ In other words, procedural involvement of actors became no longer associated with defining priorities but rather with providing expert feedback on already set priorities. The role of state officials also changed from collecting the input to presenting the results of their drafting work and collecting remarks. Technically, state officials frame both formats as partnership. However, the lack of any specification on concrete procedural formats of partnership allowed for such interpretive moves.

These dynamics became fully realised within the MCs – collaborative institutions created for each OP and dealing with overall overseeing the implementation process. Analysis of the protocols and the minutes of the MCs’ meetings across three of the countries (that is, excluding Hungary) allows for the mapping of the prevalent procedural dynamics. The meetings of the MCs occur when no general policy priorities can be altered. Thus, in full accordance with the letter of the EU Regulations, the range of issues that is being discussed during these meetings includes technical revision of the set priorities that normally implies revision of budgets, spending thresholds, absorption rates, certification of payments, control over tenders, and peculiarities of reporting. Discussions of the overall content of the OPs are extremely rare as at this point not much can be done with the priorities. Interestingly, state officials use the MCs for: reporting on overall policy developments such as the speed of absorption, etc., and informing the partners about changes that took place in Brussels; and to collect expert remarks from the societal partners on this range of issues. Additionally, the MCs in all four countries acquired an important function of approving reallocation of the Funds. The latter explains why the issue of introduction of majority voting as the main decision-making mechanism within the MCs was for a long time the main bone of contention between the authorities and societal partners. Introduction of the majority voting, although absolutely not required by the European Commission, has added a parliamentary feature to these structures that turned into small cohesion policy parliaments whose function is to approve and scrutinise spending.

In summary, the public consultations and the MCs represent the first component of the dual system. Importantly, the empirical data demonstrate that the main function of these formats is exchange of opinions and information and ensuring overall transparency and accountability of the process.

These two institutional formats are complemented by a third one, informal ad hoc meetings between state officials and certain partners. In some countries like in Slovakia and Poland, these meetings can be institutionalised to an extent. In Slovakia, they take the form of specialist groupings created by the line ministries. In Poland, these groupings are most often created by the regional authorities, who possess quite some independence as implementing agencies due to wider regionalisation in the country. In Hungary and Slovenia, they are less frequent because for a long time the line ministries were marginalised as implementers and the overall process of cohesion policy implementation was more centralised than in the two other countries.

As explained by the respondents, the groupings partially serve the same function – exchange of information on policy developments, especially the one related to the operationalisation of wider policy priorities. However, the distinct feature of this format is close interaction between the partners on translation of these widely formulated policy priorities into the language of concrete policy instruments, measurements, discussion of indicators of evaluation, and criteria of project selection. Most importantly, these discussions revolve around the Action Plans, the documents that operationalise the OPs and that translate general guidelines and thematic priorities and axes into concrete calls for proposals. The latter determines the closed, highly informal, and extremely de-politicised character of these meetings. The meetings are held between state officials representing sub-divisions within the line ministries and societal partners, organisations chosen as experts in a particular field relevant for an upcoming Action Plan or call for proposals. For this reason, the number and representation of the involved partners differ hugely across policy areas and ministries and the meetings. Moreover, some of the partners invited to these informal consultations may not be members of the MCs and may not be even seeking formalised membership. The nature of information that is exchanged during these meetings is also different – it is highly technical and specialised knowledge related to a specific areas such as indicators, various kinds of data on target groups (demographics, geographical distribution, identified needs, etc.), and their needs (education, housing, skills, etc.).

To conclude, partnership across four countries increasingly works in two principally different procedural formats. On the one hand, there are stricter institutionalised and more politicised consultations and meetings of the MCs that are held to inform partners about general policy developments and legitimise decisions on reallocation of the Funds. On the other hand, there are informal meetings devoted to the translation of wider priorities into concrete policy mechanisms through exchange of highly technical expertise. The next section depicts how actors conceptualise partnership which clarifies the functions of these practices.

5.3. Purposes of partnership interactions

Actors’ perceptions of purposes of interactions, especially tracing of how these perceptions changed over time, reveal what meanings actors assign to the practices described above, emerging normative consensus around the purpose of partnership, and the hybrid character of partnership practices.

The data obtained from the interviews reveal one important finding – initially, all involved actors excessively relied on their previous experiences of interactions when conceptualising the purpose of partnership. One can spot some kind of path dependency in actors’ interpretations. More specifically, the respondents recall that in light of unfamiliarity with the concept of partnership, they approached its purpose as analogous to interactions that took place within social dialogue and so-called civic dialogue bodies. In all four countries, these bodies were numerous – the Council for Gender Equality (Hungary), the Council for Roma people (Hungary, Slovakia), the Council for the Disabled People (Hungary, Slovakia, Poland), to name a few. Poland has a quite complex and diversified system of civic dialogue and tripartite bodies, whereas Slovenia is an established case of (neo-)corporatism (Bohle and Greskovits 2012). Interestingly, societal partners recall the prevalence of “old” practice of policy dialogue and deliberation during the first years of partnership as opposed to “presenting their comments and suggestions”, a new and allegedly alien exercise introduced at a later stage.⁵ This understanding, for instance, shaped the practices within the MCs when, as recalled by respondents, “for the first two years we were regularly meeting to discuss our topics and what we mean by ‘disability’”.⁶ The state authorities also extrapolated similar visions on interactions, which is also confirmed by the analysis of the evolution of content of discussions in the MCs.

Importantly, societal partners insisted on a different understanding of partnership or, more specifically, of their role in the partnership. The first years of partnership are marked by some degree of consensus that another role of societal partners in partnership arrangements, apart from channelling wide policy input and deliberation over wider priorities, was an exercise of the so-called civic control over policy implementation. The concept of “civic control”, when deconstructed, reveals extensive orientations of societal partners to conduct scrutiny and monitoring over the money and power abuse by the state officials, on ensuring transparency and accountability of the whole process rather than involvement in implementation. In practice, this trend transpired through active mobilisation of CSOs across four countries into the so-called monitoring coalitions (EU Watch group in Slovakia or SF Team in Poland and Hungary or coalition of environmental CSOs in Slovenia) (“to ensure the voice of civil society in management of the SFs”⁷). This orientation on scrutiny and oversight was explained as the main function of civil society and can be seen as a central element of discourse of civil society in the region. Moreover, the state officials also operated with a highly normative discourse of partnership (“being like any civilised democracy we needed to have consultations with civil society”⁸).

This consensus around the purpose of partnership was disrupted around 2007 that also affected the change of practices. There was a re-orientation, especially on the part of the state officials, towards an instrumental understanding of partnership as an exercise in collection of more specific expert input and evidence. The data show that this change occurred partially due to pressure from the European Commission that emphasised the issue of thorough absorption, and partially due to learning by the state officials of the main principles of cohesion policy planning and programming. This re-orientation has caused another effect, namely withdrawal of the first wave of CSOs from partnership activities such as programming or the MCs and dissolution of those monitoring coalitions who felt that the state officials were no longer keen on “enhancing wider participation”.⁹ The niche that emerged as a result of this disillusionment was soon filled by other CSOs, highly professional organisations dealing with service delivery rather than general advocacy or human rights. In the end, their involvement strengthened the overall understanding of partnership as a less politicised activity revolving around controlling and monitoring the abusive power of the state but as a more de-politicised exercise in evidence-based and expertise-based policy-making.

However, it can be argued that the MCs represent the institutional manifestation of the initial conceptualisation of the purpose of partnership. As the previous section mentions, the MCs started serving the function of civic monitoring and very often were used by societal partners, especially CSOs, to block certain decisions of the state authorities, mostly related to non-transparent allocation of funding. Moreover, actors such as the state officials contributed to sustaining of this orientation. In fact, the state officials directly stated that they see the MCs as an opportunity to demonstrate transparency of their agencies. In sum, one can register the presence of a double interpretation of purposes of partnership. On the one hand, there is some normative consensus around the role of the MCs as tools of scrutiny and control over allocation of the Funds and instruments of ensuring overall transparency and accountability of the implementation. On the other hand, there is consensus that other formats of partnership such as public consultations and especially informal gatherings and meetings between the state and societal actors should be used for the purpose of channelling knowledge, expertise, and policy input from societal actors upwards. Importantly, this tentative yet constantly strengthening division is sustained by principally different yet overlapping constellations of actors involved in both “partnerships”.

6. Conclusions/discussions

Table 1 summarises the evolution of partnership practices along three main dimensions.

Table 1. Evolution of partnership practices throughout three programming periods.

	2004–2006	2007–2013	2014–2020
Scope of access	Wide public participation (societal partners, individuals)	Organised civil society (associations that qualify as “civil society”, social partners)	Most representative partners (umbrella CSOs, social partners)
Institutional format/procedures	Loosely formalised wide public consultations (conferences, presentations etc.), bigger MCs	More strictly formalised public consultations with “invited” partners, smaller MCs	Strictly formalised public consultations with certain partners, smaller MCs, informal practices
Purpose of interactions	General legitimacy: policy dialogue, deliberation over policy priorities, and collection of policy input	Efficiency: collection of input, informing the public about the allocations	Efficiency and legitimacy through transparency: collection of policy input during consultations and scrutiny and oversight in the MCs

The explorative analysis demonstrates that partnership implementation has contributed to emergence of a hybrid model of interactions between state and societal actors. On the one hand, one can see that existing partnership practices reflect on general EU expectations, namely an accent on an institutionalised dialogue with the organised civil society with a specific focus on exchange of policy information, provision of policy evidence and expertise. The data show that there was a general shift from partnership as an institutionally loosely structured exercise in wide public participation for the purposes of deliberative definition of goals and collection of diverse policy input to a partnership as a more institutionalised collaboration between a limited number of actors for the purposes of exchange of highly technical information relevant for cohesion policy implementation rather than goal definition. On the other hand, one can find how this model has been enriched by other elements. In particular, the requirements of strict institutionalisation and access for the organised civil society have been relaxed, and the empirical data show the presence of a variety of informal practices of collaboration with actors who do not qualify as representatives of the organised civil society, especially if one applies representativeness as the main feature (and criterion) of the organised civil society. Additionally, partnership across the four countries is not exclusively associated with information exchange and policy evidence provision as aspects most central in the EU discourse. Actors define the purpose of partnership interactions as an important instrument of ensuring overall transparency and accountability, and it is this aspect of the overall orientation towards legitimacy that has gained special prominence across CEE member states rather than other related elements such as representation of citizens (input legitimacy). Institutionally, there is some division of labour between institutional formats of partnership and their main functions with the MCs serving the function of legitimation and the public consultations and informal interactions – the function of evidence and information exchange.

Although not aiming at explaining the reasons behind the described changes, let alone measuring the strength or weakness of potential mechanisms of Europeanisation, the article has nevertheless provided rich material for future research. Perhaps the most important finding, in this sense, is the observed changes of practices of partnership that occurred as a result of a multiplicity of factors. Future research could highlight the role of the pressures from the European Commission and learning by both state officials and societal actors as factors of change. Another promising direction is research on the role of actors’ larger normative understandings of such phenomena as civil society or the role of the state in policy processes on practices of partnership. There is great potential for research on uncovering how actors’ strategies and actions in the CEE member states are embedded in larger normative structures and, importantly, how and whether these understandings vary, both across CEE member states and across the EU member states, in general. There are good reasons to expect that this research agenda may generate original findings and enrich (as well as challenge) Europeanisation scholarship that remains analytically and conceptually dismissive of the normative differences.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Dr Andrey Demidov is a Post-doctoral fellow in ACCESS Europe (Amsterdam Center for Contemporary European Studies), University of Amsterdam. His recent publications are “Efficient Implementers and Partners. What Do We Miss in Our Understanding of How Cohesion Policy Administrators Work?” In Reassessing the European Union’s Cohesion Policy, edited by Sally Hardy, John Bachtler, Peter Berkowitz, and Tatjana Muravska, Routledge, 2016 and “In Pursuit of Common Good? Understanding Contestation over the Partnership Principle for Structural Funds in the CEE Member States.” Journal of European integration, 2016, Vol. 38, N2.

Notes

1. Interview with a state official, Slovenia, 9 Sep 2012.

2. Interview with a state official, Slovenia, 5 Apr 2012.

3. Interview with a state official, Hungary, 27 Mar 2013.

4. Interview with a state official, Poland, 13 Jun 2013.

5. Interview with a CSO official, Poland, 18 Jun 2013.

6. Interview with a CSO official, Hungary,14 Feb 2013.

7. Interview with a CSO official, Poland, 13 Sept 2012.

8. Interview with a state official, Hungary, 29 Apr 2013.

9. Interview with a CSO official, Hungary, 10 May 2011.