The Europeanization of Territorial Governance: results from an analysis across the board

Since the 1990s developments in the territorial dimension of EU policies has progressively fostered member states’ territorial governance and spatial planning systems to become one of the key components of EU integrated development strategies and policy delivery mechanisms. The extent to which this created a catalytic environment resulting in a so called ‘Europeanization’ of territorial governance and spatial planning is however subject of debate. Aiming at shedding light on this matter, the paper builds on the provisional results of the ESPON COMPASS project to investigate the role that the EU plays in shaping national territorial governance and spatial planning and vice versa. It does so by understanding territorial governance and spatial planning systems as ‘institutional technologies’ subject to continuous change and classifying the possible influences that link the EU and the Member States within the overall European territorial governance framework. In particular, it identifies three types of top-down influence from the EU to the country level (structural, instrumental, discursive top-down), two types of bottom-up influence through which the European countries potentially influence EU policy- making (discursive bottom-up, practical), and the horizontal influence through which countries potentially influence one another. The impact of these six types of influence is explored systematically for the 32 States of the ESPON area (28 EU Member States plus 4 neighbour countries), in order to reflect on the main commonalities and differences that characterise the Europeanization of territorial governance and (ii) on what this can suggest for the improvement of European territorial governance.