Six years after joining the European Union, Bulgaria and Romania have the lowest absorption rate of European structural and cohesion funds from all EU-27 countries. This paper unpacks the concept of “absorption capacity” by examining the potential factors associated to Bulgaria’s and Romania’s low absorption rates. It scrutinizes the role played by these countries’ regional authorities and actors (e.g. regional development agencies) in the process. What is absorption capacity and what may explain the variation between the two cases? Has the process of managing funds strengthened regional authorities or territorial identities? This is an under-researched area, particularly for Central and Eastern European states, with few definitions present in the literature (Brusis 2002; Sumpikova 2003; Horvat & Maier 2005; Jaenike 2011).
The growing debate on regional authorities (Hooghe et al 2008) and evaluations of the impact that cohesion and structural policy has on new member states (Bachtler & McMaster 2007) provides another basis for analyzing developments in the two countries. As opposed to Poland and Hungary, where administrative reforms lead to an efficient decentralization and to the creation of multi-level layers of regional management, Bulgaria and Romania remain overly centralized states, adapting only artificial instilments of the NUTS II regions (O’Dwyer 2006). The paper builds on recent Europeanization contributions on the importance of internal/domestic factors (Borzel & Risse 2011; Sedelmeir 2011) combined with literature on post-communist transitions. Empirically, it uses country profile data provided by the World Bank, Eurostat and other international organizations. This data is processed through a matrix of analysis using four distinct indicators of analysis (institutional, administrative, human, and external). The paper claims that institutionalized factors and procedural patterns derived from the countries’ recent communist past and transition era (Eriksen 2007), coupled with a centralization of state power influences these countries’ performance.
