Regionalisation via EU multilevel governance and territorial cohesion: Path dependency and institutional change in the western-Mediterranean islands of Corsica and Sardinia.

This thesis looks at the definition and diffusion within the EU of a new model of policy-making and implementation based on regions acting within a multilevel system of governance. The focus of the empirical research is on INTERREG, an experimental Community Initiative that has promoted interregional cooperation across national borders. This thesis argues that INTERREG represents a particularly coherent case of the EU's approach to regional planning and territorial development: in fact, it extends multilevel governance to interregional partnerships defined beyond national borders and adds a territorial dimension to the goal of socio-economic cohesion. Since 1990, when INTERREG was first launched, territorial cooperation has become increasingly relevant to EU Regional Policy (and in the accession of new Member States) until when, in 2007, it was mainstreamed as one of the three new priority objectives of the policy. Drawing evidence from the implementation of INTERREG in the 'islands' programme between the regions of Corsica (FR) and Sardinia (I) from 1990 until 2005, this thesis shows how the process of administrative capacity and institution building promoted by the European Commission at the subnational level has gradually empowered regional actors to take responsibility for the planning and management of strategies for sustainable development of their territories. Although lacking the traditions of interregional cooperation and sharing a past of dependency on their respective central governments in development planning, regional actors have gradually adopted and learned to incorporate the cooperative logic of the EU model proposed by the programme and extended it to other policy domains. However, the potential of interregional cross-border cooperation in terms of enhancing territorial cohesion appears to be limited by the persistent peripherality of the islands and their wider territorial setting (the Western-Mediterranean), prompting the need for a wide-ranging spatial strategy capable of coordinating EU policies