ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is on the way in which European Commission funding opportunities have helped to reshape attitudes to local and regional economic regeneration. In particular we examine the European Commission’s efforts to ensure that a community economic development (CED) spending priority was inserted into Objective 2 Structural Funds programmes in Great Britain. At one level this can be seen as part of an ideological contest between the neoliberal approaches to regeneration held by the then Conservative-led UK government and the Commission’s agenda for an approach which placed greater emphasis on the importance on direct interventions to combat social exclusion (see Lloyd and Meegan 1996). One product of this difference of views was that, while the Commission successfully introduced a spending priority in this area from 1994 onwards for those British regions eligible for Structural Funds, in practice it found that attempts at innovation were not emerging in the ways expected. This was due at least as much to the nature of the bureaucratic structures and local elites involved as to outright opposition by the government of the day. To some extent it was also linked to the fact that earlier attempts at this kind of approach had either been discredited or simply that their successes had leaked from the collective memory.
