The Challenge of Socio-economic Cohesion in the Enlarged European Union

The proposed research project, which is structurally based on the comparative analysis of the role of social capital and civil society in achieving the goals of development policy through stimulating social partnerships and improving levels of administrative capacity, is based on research conducted in non-Cohesion (Germany and Italy), old Cohesion (Greece and Spain), CEE (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland) and candidate states (Bulgaria and Romania) of the EU. The project focuses on identifying the patterns of interactions between the levels of social capital and the capacity of civil society to choose effective and efficient development policy strategies and implementation processes to achieve the goal of sustainable development. Hence, the principal goal of the project is threefold: first, to identify the existing differences in the structure of civil society between the old and new Member States, by evaluating the level of social capital present in different territorial contexts; second, to assess how these differences in the strength of social capital and civil society may be related to the levels of effectiveness and efficiency of development policies in these countries; and third, to identify ways in which the Europeanization of public policy (in our case, cohesion policy) may be used to strengthen the level of social capital and civil society at large, thus indirectly affecting/improving the levels of effectiveness and efficiency of development policy.