This article considers the relationship between centralised, exogenous institutions and the embedded, endogenous institutions of rural governance in Europe through an examination of the evaluation procedures of the European LEADER programme. LEADER is presented in the literature as progressive...

The additionality principle says that the funds of the European Union should not replace, but be an addition to national regional policy funds. The benchmark for the co-funding is that the EU bears 50% of total costs associated with regional projects eligible for EU support. In some regions,...

The term "competitiveness" has been used in conceptually distinct ways at the firm, regional and national levels. After primarily reviewing existing concepts at the national level, we introduce a new definition of regional competitiveness adapting definitions used in the academic literature....

Enhancing competitiveness is a popular target in economic policy making - not only at the national, but at the regional level as well despite neither generally accepted definition nor any strong agreement on how to measure it. In this chapter we discuss the conceptual underpinnings of why it is...

This paper focuses on the climate change challenge faced by Central & Eastern European countries both those inside the European Union and those outside it. They have enormous energy intensity and associated greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mainly from energy production, which is oil, and worse,...

Innovation performance seems to rely on efficiently integrating and extending different pieces of various types of knowledge emerging from diverse external sources. Different research traditions have stressed both formal (FSK) and informal sources of knowledge (ISK) as innovation performance...

The European Youth Capital is an annual title awarded to a European city by the European Youth Forum, aiming to strength the relationship between the municipalities and the European Union institutions, with a particular focus on youth participation. Until now, little is known about the impacts...

Current innovation policy is the result of decades of research about the nature and role of innovation in economic growth. Such investigation has contributed to redesign our knowledge not only on the role played by innovation in economic development but also about the relationship between...

A common phenomenon of development is the big difference in its levels, especially between metropolitan areas and other areas, called peripheries. There are also big differences in opportunities for development, including the location of new investment. Peripheral areas are characterized by...