Professional Cooperation as Vector of Local Europeanisation: Dealing with EU Structural Funds in the Social Services of Liège (BE) as Case Study

This paper focuses on the daily professional cooperation among local actors in order to manage Structural funds. I argue that these horizontal interactions are strong vectors of Europeanization since local actors have to cooperate and exchange best practices to improve, their chance to obtain funds on the one hand, and, their daily management on the other hand. Literature has mainly focused on vertical interactions between local government and EU institutions. In contrast, this paper goes a step further by combining both vertical and horizontal relationships and put forward an interactive model. Therefore, the main research question asks how does EU funding process impact on the local structures of cooperation. I argue that vertical interactions with EU institutions lead the local actors to strengthen their capacity of cooperation and reform their organizational structures. To address this question, this paper combines the Europeanization literature with territorial public administration theory (Vion, 2005). In the latter perspective, local actors are considered as specialists of their own urban territory and autonomous agents able to build strategic networks in order to improve their capacity of cooperation and of managing funds. This approach requires to use methods inspired by urban and territorial administration such as field observation, mapping policy networks and stressing the urban policy process in a long time perspective (since 1993). I test my hypothesis through an in-depth qualitative analysis based on a case study: the local social services of Liège (BE). As exploratory fieldwork has already shown, this case is relevant because on the one hand, the city manage Structural funds for a long time. And, on the other hand, because of the strong social actor’s network in this city facing an important industrial crisis. The data consist in semi-structured interviews, on local policy reports, and the study of regional and European operational programs.