Review article
https://doi.org/10.21861/hgg.2011.73.01.05
Progress in Administrative Decentralisation in Transformation Countries – a Comparative Survey*
Peter Jordan
orcid.org/0000-0002-5656-0045
; Institute of Urban and Regional Research, Austrian Academy of Science, Vienna, Austria
Abstract
Decentralisation has an important meaning in the context of European integration, since a Europe composed of subsidiary spatial units is to be constructed and a ”Europe of regions” is on the agenda of many political discussions. From the early 1990s, the European
Communities (EC), later the European Union (EU), promoted the idea of administrative decentralisation also in transformation countries. For EU accession, decentralisation was made one of the prerequisites. But it met centralistic traditions originating not only in the Communist era and could be partly enforced only with considerable difficulties.
The paper investigates in a comparative way the efforts made and the results achieved so far in East-Central and Southeast European countries to establish local as well as regional self-government. A special focus is laid on the regional level, to which administrative powers have been devolved only later and partly insufficiently. Special attention is also paid to the correspondence of administrative regionalisation with historical regional and cultural identities.
Keywords
administrative decentralisation; regional identities; European integration; political geography
Hrčak ID:
71452
URI
Publication date:
1.8.2011.
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