Regionalism

As early as 1992, the Treaty of the Southern African Development Community (SADC) already included a commitment to human rights, democracy, and the rule of law as governance standards in its member states, but it was in 2001 that SADC significantly broadened its efforts at governance transfer. SADC focuses in particular on standards related to gender, (socioeconomic) human rights, and (electoral) democracy, which are promoted and protected through various instruments including military interventions and sanctions in the framework of security cooperation. While the rule of law and good governance have also gained a more prominent place on the agenda since 2001, standards and instruments are less developed. Overall, there is a significant gap between the prescription of standards and policies on the one hand and the implementation of measures on the other. The suspension of the SADC Tribunal in 2010 following its rulings on human rights issues clearly shows the limits of SADC as an active promoter vis-à-vis its member states.

"The aim of this paper is to adapt related variety calculations to the special case of
Hungarian regional development in the late post-socialist transition period. First, we test
regional employment growth in rising and declining regions separately, in order to
distinguish those areas that could cope with economic transition and those that could not.
We find that related variety speeded up growth in the dynamic regions but at the same time
pushed lagging regions onto a downhill path; this may have been due to their inflexible
industry structure. Following this, regional variety measures are decomposed into domestic
and foreign subsets, and a new variable, ownership variety, is introduced. Findings suggest
that regional employment growth is due to related variety in the domestic set in earlier
phases, whereas the economy has evolved into a stage in which relatedness among foreign
firms enhances regional employment growth significantly."

The debate on the EU “democratic deficit” and the role of the regions provides the opportunity to review the current practices of regional parliaments aimed at enhancing their institutional role in the multilevel governance system of the EU. Therefore, this paper is intended to analyze the Europeanization of the Catalan parliament through the measures and procedures it has adopted to build the institutional capacities that are needed to face the European challenges. We argue that adaptation requires specific capacities related to a set of functions and resources that a parliament is expected to perform/develop if it intends to increase transparency and accountability in the EU multilevel system (i.e. follow up of legislative proposals, government monitoring, political debate, technical expertise, communication channels with societal actors, intra-state and trans-national cooperation).