ABSTRACT

This paper presents work that is still in progress at the time of the EURRN 1997 conference. The project was started in the spring of 1996 when the Study of Co-regional Planning in Europe (SCOPE) project had received all the necessary agreements from the participating partners and funding institutions, including the European Union. It has been based on the assumption that the time has come to break with existing traditions in international comparative regional policy studies and experiment with an approach of co-regional planning in Europe. This idea leaves behind the usual national perspective in such enterprises, in favour of a direct exchange of local and regional experts from different countries. As such, this paper does not try, and cannot, be the product of an academic exercise but rather a report of what has been achieved so far and is intended to provide a stimulus to discuss the underlying ideas. This paper is as much a presentation of the particular approach chosen for the SCOPE project as it is a review of the substantive findings related to the workings of national and EU initiatives in the fields of regional and agricultural policies.