The Lisbonisation of EU Cohesion Policy:Changing governance practices?

One of the major goals of the European Union is to foster the economic, social and territorial cohesion within the Union. To achieve this, the European Union has an extensive regional policy, better known as Cohesion Policy, receiving a major share of the EU’s total budget. In recent years, Cohesion Policy has become a tool of implementation for the Europe 2020 programme, previously known as the Lisbon Strategy. In this thesis, the influence of the Lisbon Strategy on the governance of practices of Cohesion Policy has been evaluated by performing a longitudinal analysis of the 2000, 2007, and forthcoming 2014 Cohesion Policy reforms by tracing the introduction experimental governance practices associated with the Lisbon Strategy (a process called Lisbonisation in this context) in this period. It appears that the governance practices of Cohesion policy are indeed Lisbonising, albeit a slower pace after the 2007 reform.