Strategic planning as region building on the eastern periphery of the EU

Smith, SO

Abstract

This article describes how region-building is performed by four strategic planning initiatives in north-eastern Slovakia, highlighting a tension between balanced and concentrated development perspectives in Slovak regional policy. The plans are read as records of an institutionalizing process, the product of which is the creation of a lasting collaborative relationship between actors. If strategic planning could fulfil a mobilizing and integrating function in eastern Slovakia, it would constitute a significant contribution to the successful negotiation of social and economic transformations associated with post-communist structural change and European Union (EU) accession. Region-building is complicated by an over-emphasis on endogenous perspectives among local actors, hindering vertical integration, and an indeterminacy about the scale at which such an integration is best performed.

Citation

Smith, S. (2007). Strategic planning as region building on the eastern periphery of the EU. European Planning Studies, 15(8), 1007-1025. https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310701448154

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: May 1, 2006
• Online Publication Date: Aug 10, 2007
• Publication Date: Aug 10, 2007
• Deposit Date: Jan 13, 2009
• Journal: European Planning Studies
• Print ISSN: 0965-4313
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 15
• Issue: 8
• Pages: 1007-1025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/09654310701448154
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09654310701448154
• Related Public URLs: http://www.tandfonline.com/toc/ceps20/current