EU member states may define their own regional policies according to their own needs and as a logical consequence there are many different approaches. Level of decentralization differs from state to state and in some, especially more developed and larger countries, responsibility mostly lies on regions and less on national legal framework.
However, some issues such as need for territorial cohesion in wider area or necessity to support areas with specific development issues, are recognized and analysed also on EU level. Based on those common challenges some guiding documents related to spatial/regional/territorial development were prepared at EU level. With aim to improve connections and cooperation of member states and create joint approaches for similar issues in larger areas, EU introduced macroregional strategies. In the EU, term regional policy often has a same meaning as cohesion policy. European structural and investments funds are of great importance for regional development since they offer quite high amounts for funding projects. Balancing approach to EU funds utilization and own regional policy is one of the challenges for Republic of Croatia. On the one hand, there is awareness that additional investments are necessary in the whole territory (to fulfill obligations in sectors such as waste management, water supply and collection or to support economy that still faces consequences of economic crises). On the other hand, Croatia faces significant regional unbalances that can not be solved without investments from EU funds. |
In 1994 EU established Committee of the Regions in order to enable particiapation of cities and regions in designing EU policies.
More on the activities of CoR is available at: http://cor.europa.eu/hr/Pages/home.aspx |