The Multiple Dimensions of the Europeanisation of Local Government. An Empirical Exploration of the Flemish Case

It has been commonly acknowledged that local authorities are increasingly affected in various aspects of their daily activities by EU decisions and by Europe-wide developments (Goldsmith, 2011; Van Bever, Reynaert & Steyvers, 2011). So far, studies of this Europeanization process at the local level have mainly focused on a top-down approach, defining Europeanization as the rather passive implementation of EU legislation, or as meeting the criteria for receiving money from the EU structural funds. Yet meanwhile, there are also indications that a new opportunity-structure for local governments has arisen, and that local authorities have gained new opportunities to influence EU policy-making and promote their interests more actively. On one hand, local authorities have started to by-pass national or regional governments in order to try to gain direct access to European institutions to defend their interests (i.e. bottom-up Europeanization). On the other hand, local authorities became more and more active in all sorts of networks and partnership arrangements to facilitate best practice transfers as well (i.e. horizontal Europeanization). This paper will focus on these two more active dimensions of local level Europeanization. In doing so, it will try to outline how local governments in Flanders (the Northern region of Belgium) can (and in some cases already have) develop(ed) into active users of the arisen opportunities. The paper combines a theoretical discussion with empirical results stemming from a survey on local level Europeanization in Flanders.