REGIONERNAS EUROPA - EU:s regionalpolitik och dess påverkan på Sveriges regionalpolitik

Abstract

The EU regional policy is one of the largest policy areas today, and is the main investment policy in the European Union (EU). The regional policy was developed in the 1990’s to address social and economic inequality within the member states. Before the regional policy was controlled by the EU, each member state had their own regional policy on a national level. This bachelor thesis aims to compare how Sweden’s goals within the regional policy have changed from the EU-entry 1995 to today by investigating how Europeanization, regionalization and multi-level governance has affected the regional policy in Sweden. Europeanization is used to explain how national policies have changed with regard to the EU and its policies. Regionalization and multilevel governance will be used to examine how EU has affected Sweden’s domestic regional system as an effect of the EU membership. Regionalization describe a change of power in which the regional level has been giving a greater power than the national. Multilevel governance is a theory used to explain a pattern caused by Europeanization of the regional policy. The result presented in this thesis indicates that The EU has had a big influence on the Sweden regional goals from 1995 until today. By comparing Sweden and EU the result also shows that there has occurred a great adaption of the domestic policy and therefore adaption of the Swedish goals.