European policies and domestic reform: a case study of structural fund management in Italy

There has been a conspicuous impact of European Union (EU) policies in Italy, and the so-called ‘Europeanization’ of Italian public policies has consequently become a salient research topic. One such public policy area concerns the decentralization of the state and regional policies. There is a strong consensus that European policies played an important role in the wave of reforms carried through since 1992 which aimed at decentralizing the Italian state and reforming its regional policies. The impact of European policies on these reforms has been described as one of ‘convergent effects’ or as an outcome of ‘transnational discourse’. Yet, to date, there has been little detailed analysis of exactly how domestic and European factors have interacted in this public policy arena. In an earlier paper we showed how this interaction changed over time, thus modifying the mechanisms through which the impact of European policies was felt. We identified a difference between a ‘negative’ European impact in an earlier phase—where European Monetary Union (EMU) and the European limitations imposed on national state aid assisted in dismantling entrenched regional policies—and a ‘positive’ impact at a later stage, where European policies contributed to new policy developments. The analysis, however, also suggested that identifying exactly whether and how the latter impact occurred was complex. In this paper, therefore, we develop this part of the research further, analysing in more detail how European policies contributed to new Italian regional policy developments in the 1990s.