Suchergebnisse

Despite a large amount of literature on multilevel governance, relatively little empirical attention has been paid to decision-making in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper contributes to closing this research gap by focussing on multilevel cross-border decision-making across the Czech-Saxon border region. Specific attention is paid to the involvement of non-state actors and to the main challenges of cross-border multilevel governance in the case study's region. Although there is a tendency on both sides of the border to invite partners from the private and nonprofit sectors into the decision-making process, the situation in the case-study region is far from the normative conceptualization of EU multilevel governance. For whole region the most important obstacles to balanced regional development were shown to be a multilevel mismatch, different languages, and the lack of a common strategy, while insufficient capacities at the local and regional levels were found on the Czech side.

EU Cohesion Policy requires the interaction of public, private and non-profit sectors in policy making. The case of the Czech Republic enables us to identify the major obstacles to the successful implementation of this approach as the Czech population perceives the ability of NGOs to influence policies at the lowest level among all the EU member states. The goal of the study is to identify and explain the determinants of success and failure regarding NGOs' participation in designing public programmes. The methodology includes a combination of in-depth interviews with NGOs' representatives and public servants, a review of official documents, a focus group, and a stakeholders' review of the study's conclusions. The main obstacles to the implementation of the partnership principle are the following: insufficient capacities among NGOs; fluctuations in participating public servants and NGO representatives; dependence of partnership on personal contacts; late start and non-consultative, informative character of partnership.

AbstractSocial innovation is perceived as a collaborative response from civic society actors to societal challenges and as such is increasingly being recognised as a driver for sustainable development. Social innovation promotes civic values, particularly in marginalised rural areas that are often struggling with biophysical and market limits, as well as shortages of public funding. In order to identify diverging development paths (DDPs) for social innovation, in this article, we use two large sets of empirical material from the SIMRA research project. First, for meta‐analyses of social innovation in diverse situations and contexts, we use 211 validated social innovation examples. Second, we rely on 11 in‐depth cases to reflect on the contexts and dimensions of social innovation. The elaboration of conceptualisation and deductive analyses result in the creation of a typology of social innovation DDPs, with four DDPs identified and explained. The article provides an improved understanding of how social innovation emerges and develops and how to capture processes and resulting changes in marginalised rural areas in order to turn such areas' diversity into strengths. An important conclusion is that social innovation involves both local and external actors, yet cannot develop without specific internal local activity and local knowledge.