ABSTRACT
Introduction This chapter explores the growing role of the voluntary and community sector, the third sector, in the design and delivery of regional policy. During the 1990s attention has shifted from the original concern of regional policy, that of reducing income and unemployment disparities between regions (a traditional function of the nation state), to the processes of regional development: for example, through the creation of new regional institutions and the development of partnerships between organisations. Such partnerships have also begun to include organisations from the voluntary and community sectors. The prime example of this was the emergence during the 1990s of priorities for Community Economic Development in the Structural Funds programmes of the European Union.
