ABSTRACT
The chapter first seeks to set UK and other EU Member States’ experience of regional planning in the increasingly important context of EU Cohesion and Regional Policy, and the ESDP. The Cohesion and Regional Policy has a long history and has grown in such importance in the activities of the EU that its funding now constitutes almost 50 per cent of the EU budget. The ESDP is more recent and does not yet have the power of a substantial budget, but it does have the power of ideas, concepts and information. Within this EU context, the current 27 Member States, with a combined population of approximately 496 million, provide a wide variety of regional planning experience.
