02-02-2010

The call for papers is organised by the Ghent university in the framework of a conference "The road to Europe: main street or backward alley for local governments in Europe?" taking place on 29 and 30 April 2010 in Ghent (Belgium).

A selection of papers will be presented at a conference organised at the Ghent university (Belgium) and published in an edited volume. Applicants are expected to present a paper that focuses on one of the following subtopics of bottom-up Europeanisation at the local level:

The European integration process can undoubtedly be considered as one of the main political developments of the past decades. This development was characterized by different treaty changes that led to a growing cooperation between the Member States at both economic and political level (deepening) on the one hand, and successive accessions of new Member States (enlargement) on the other. For this reason, it is commonly assumed that membership of the European Union has Europeanized many - if not all aspects - of national political life.

Also local authorities are confronted with the growing European dimension of their village streets. More in particular, the EU for example impacts on local government as a result of the regulations and directives it produces in order to secure the implementation of its programs and policies. This growing importance of Europe on local government leads us to the following question: how does Europe impact on the behaviour of lower tier governments? In other words, how and to what extent do local governments react to this ‘Europeanization’?

So far, Europeanization studies at the local level mainly focused on a top-down approach, defining Europeanization as the implementation of EU legis lation or as meeting the criteria for receiving money from the EU structural funds. That is to say, Europeanization as input from the EU to local governments. There are however also indications that local governments have developed from passive policy-takers to active policy-makers in the European multi-level context. Local authorities for example have started to by-pass national or regional governments and tried to gain direct access to European institutions to defend their interests. They also became more and more active in all sorts of networks and partnerships to facilitate best practice transfer, which can also be considered as an important aspect of local (horizontal) Europeanization. The general purpose of this conference is to get a better insight on the so called bottom-up aspect of Europeanization (output from local governments to the EU).