ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews relevant literature for thinking about cohesion policy with the goal of identifying the varied analytical approaches and their implications for the study of Social Fund outputs. It focuses on scholarship which theorizes compliance as well as theoretical models accounting for domestic implementation capacities, multi-level governance, and return on investment. The chapter explains why the performance of Spain and Slovakia defies widely adopted theoretical propositions, and why theories on policy implementation are better suited for capturing and explaining factors driving policy outputs. The study of cohesion policy tends to be nested within a larger field of Europeanization research. The rationalist accounts of European Union (EU) integration argue that strong supranational pressure, supported with incentives and coercive mechanisms, will trigger member states' compliance with EU law, especially if the expected conformity lowers the transaction costs of domestic policymaking. The social inclusion strategies were open to interpretation and left in the domain of national, regional, and local decision-making.
