Two Perspectives on EU's Regional Policy

Abstract: This master thesis in European Spatial Planning and Regional Development will present two ideal types on regional development, and analyse Swedish regional policy for the EU programme period of 2014-2020. Through a historical background, the characteristics of the two types are distinguished, and used in the analysis of the Europe 2020 strategy, the Swedish national Partnership Agreement, and the regional operational programmes for the eight NUTS 2 regions in Sweden. The aim is to see if there are influences of the perspectives in the EU regional policy, and how they can be understood in a Swedish context. With a content analysis approach, the main finding is that it is possible to see more of one of the ideal types strategic EU documents than in the regional operational programmes.