’Drop in the sea’ - Give Kids a Chance program in the district of Encs or chances of place-based development interventions

Abstract

This paper scrutinizes the eTects of a Cohesion Policy-funded place-based intervention in an Eastern European EU member state through analysing the case of Give Kids a Chance program in the district of Encs, a disadvantaged neighbourhood at the northeast periphery of Hungary. In the analysis I explore ways the domestic institutional environment can impair a progressive place-based initiative aiming to tackle child poverty and contribute to preserving existing socio-spatial inequalities rather than furthering spatial justice. The analysis builds on G. Fekete Éva’s activist and academic work about the development of disadvantaged micro-regions through participative institutional mechanisms that enable the deliberation of local needs and mobilize local knowledge for development. Several decades ahead of her times G. Fekete studied the ways local deliberations enabled by a multi-level institutional system can contribute to promotion of socio-spatial equality.

The place-based approach has been the guiding principle of the EU’s Cohesion Policy for a decade. Building on the idea that place matters, the place-based narrative advocates that sociospatial inequalities can be overcome by the production of place-tailored public goods designed and implemented through integrated and deliberative policy decisions. This way, place-based public policies can make a positive contribution to spatial justice through participative procedures for more equitable distribution of public resources. The role of external agents is to help local actors to mobilize resources ‘from below’ through an enabling regulative framework. Within the EU’s multilevel governance system, the EU can provide incentives for place-based policies, but the implementation of these interventions is strongly embedded in national policy regimes. Research in economic sociology has found that place-based interventions, in order to generate positive resources for local development, must be based on a ‘virtuous relationship’ between various scales of government. This relationship is shaped by a governance framework that applies principles of distributed authority, integration of various branches of policies, and partnership between the central state, lower levels of state and non-state actors.

The findings of extended fieldwork suggest that in the absence of a virtuous relationship between levels of government in domestic policy regimes, place-based interventions cannot make a positive contribution to spatial justice, but rather preserve existing inequalities in local power relations and in access to public services. The study demonstrates the way the priorities and governance modes of Give Kids a Chance were reshaped under the constraining effects of the domestic policy landscape. Centralization, selective decentralization in the form of outsourcing policy delivery and disinvestment in social policy are identified as trends in the Hungarian public policy to have contributed to the loss of place-based program elements and coordination mechanisms of Give Kids a Chance program. The study concludes CP funded place-based programs have weak capacities to affect domestic policy systems through spill-overs as governance modes can hijack local place-based initiatives to deliver policy objectives of national governments. If the latter are based on the systematic reproduction of injustice narrowly targeted place-based projects can only be a ‘drop in the sea’ without long-term effects for marginalized communities.