The role of social capital within policy networks: evidence from EU cohesion policy in Spain
| Author | Andrea Noferini,Jacint Jordana,Fabiola Mota |
| Published date | 01 December 2012 |
| Date | 01 December 2012 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852312455577 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
International Review of
Administrative Sciences
78(4) 642–664
!The Author(s) 2012
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DOI: 10.1177/0020852312455577
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International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Article
The role of social capital within
policy networks: evidence from
EU cohesion policy in Spain
Jacint Jordana
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, and Institut Barcelona d’Estudis
Internacionals, Spain
Fabiola Mota
Universitat Auto
´noma d Madrid, Spain
Andrea Noferini
Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, and University Institute of
European Studies, Barcelona, Spain
Abstract
This article focuses on the policy process stemming from European cohesion policy at
the regional level and at its programming stage (which precedes the implementation
phase). It aims to explain how the formally introduced EU ‘partnership’ principles and
rules work in practice in different political environments. The article argues that exter-
nally introduced procedural decision rules have different impacts on effective policy-
making processes. In particular, we suggest that the patterns of social capital linkages
carried by the actors involved produce different regional policy networks, even though
the existing formal rules are similar. Relying on social network analysis as its main
methodological tool, the article presents empirical evidence drawn from two similar
Spanish regions, identifies the characteristics of the actors’ social capital and compares
the structures of the policy networks dealing with the programming tasks in the two
regions. Our findings suggest that the structures differ according to the amount of
linking social capital displayed by the actors involved in the policy networks. We discuss
in detail our exploratory hypothesis, considering also other possible variables that might
account for these variations.
Points for practitioners
In this article we demonstrate that the EU partnership principle, as a set of formal rules,
does not always work in practice as expected; we found that only when the actors
Corresponding author:
Jacint Jordana, Department of Political and Social Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain and Institut
Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals, Barcelona, Spain
Email: jacint.jordana@upf.edu
involved share a certain level of trust does it produceand reinforce the expected pluralist
and deliberative contexts for decision-making. In fact, EU partnership rules contribute to
making policymaking more transparent and better procedurally organized by essentially
sorting out the social capital resources already possessed by public and private actors
involved in the policy network. This suggests that investing in the creation of social capital
for regional elites might significantly improve the current EU institutional design of regio-
nal policy. More generally, we argue that partnership designs that provide stronger incen-
tives for political and social elites to build their own social capital resources could make
the implementation of decentralized regional policies more effective.
Keywords
bonding, bridging, Cohesion Policy, European Union, linking social capital, multi-level
governance, procedural rules, regional policy, structural funds
1. Introduction
European cohesion policy has triggered the Europeanization
1
of domestic regional
policy across European Union (EU) member states (Bache and Jordan, 2006;
Leonardi, 2006). As with many other policy fields in Europe, the growing institu-
tionalization of the EU has had a major impact on the member states, and regional
policy, which has emerged in European countries over several decades, is closely
interrelated with the designs and main objectives delineated in Brussels (e.g. Bache,
1998, 2008; Hooghe, 1996). As a key component, this new policymaking architec-
ture was constructed based on a multi-level governance perspective, particularly
through the introduction in the 1988 reform of Structural Funds of new procedures
and principles – mainly the partnership principle (Bache, 1998; Hooghe, 1996;
Jordan, 2001; Marks, 1993). In simple terms, under multi-level governance different
tiers of government in the EU share decision-making competencies at a variety of
levels rather than at the national level only (Hooghe and Marks, 2001: 3). EU
multi-level governance
2
also connotes the mobilization of regional and local autho-
rities as well as the involvement of private actors and public authorities, usually
through public–private policymaking networks. European policymaking can there-
fore be characterized by the presence of a ‘multiplicity of politically independent
but otherwise interdependent actors at different levels of territorial aggregation
engaging in more-or-less continuous negotiation/deliberation/implementation’
(Schmitter, 2004: 45).
We argue that the EU’s cohesion policy is a good example of where bridges can
be built between multi-level governance research literature and studies on imple-
menting participatory modes of policymaking. According to the new governance
research agenda, the role of cohesion policy’s partnership principle in the creation
of EU multi-level governance is similar to those of other forms of stakeholder
partnerships and collaborative modes of policymaking. This means that it contrib-
utes to efficacy and performance in public policy implementation on the one hand,
Jordana et al. 643
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