National Policies and Territorial Cohesion

Abstract

Since March 2020, the European Union has launched a wide range of initiatives to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly through two complementary channels “through creating a new set of initiatives aimed specifically at resolving and or mitigating the effects of the pandemic in terms of public health, but also the resulting economic and social effects [and] by mobilizing a set of policies and public policy instruments to combat the effects of the pandemic, with the purpose of allo- cating resources to the new needs of the European economy and society” (Neto in Europa XXI J Regional Sci Territorial Policies 38:33–50, 2020). The main objectives of this chapter are: (i) to analyse the extent to which the new European rationale of policies to respond to the economic and social impacts of the pandemic, and in partic- ular the European Recovery and Resilience Facility, enabled the emergence of a new generation of strategies and national public policies, which, within the framework of the great principles of the European Union that guide recovery, seek to provide specific answers to the way in which each member state was affected by the pandemic and how it conceives its recovery process; (ii) Carry out a comparative analysis of the intervention rationales of the Recovery and Resilience Plans (RRP) of a set of Member States; (iii) Evaluate how each of these RRPs establishes and/or foresees, or not, some model of articulation with the respective Partnership Agreements 2014– 2020 and 2021–2027 of the Cohesion Policy; (iv) Analyse to what extent each RRP assumes or determines, or not, a territorialisation of its intervention.