The Challenge of Policy Integration. The Case of Sustainable Urban Development in the EU Cohesion Policy

Despite the fact that the phenomenon of policy integration has concerned many policy sectors in the EU, scholarly interest has remained mainly focused on few of them and, in particular, on the environmental domain. Surprisingly, the EU cohesion policy, where an integrated approach has been promoted from the very origins, has not received much attention from academia. The current programming period 2014-2020 opens new opportunities in this sense, as the new regulatory framework requires further strengthening of policy and governance settings allowing for cross-sectoral policy integration and collaborative decision-making, especially at local level. Such approach is particularly encouraged in urban areas. This paper has a double fold objective. First, it aims to trace the consolidation of policy integration instruments in cohesion policy revealing how the principle of policy integration has been conceptualised in this field with particular regards to the urban dimension. Second, it explores the implementation path of these instruments in Italy and the UK, trying to understand to what extent the preliminary policy outputs have met the EU policy ambitions in these different domestic contexts.