PhD Students

The thesis investigates models of participation of socially excluded and disengaged groups in Sustainable Urban Mobility initiatives (SUM). SUM envisions various forms of active mobilities, such as walking, cycling and public transport services, becoming the most accessible, affordable, and reliable choice for citizens to get around in the city to complete their daily activities and errands. This research aims to bridge the gap between the policymaking and the voices of the citizens by using an active participatory approach as both ends hold value to ensure SUM initiatives are met particularly in socially excluded and disengaged groups.

This thesis explores how participatory budgeting and deliberative engagement can best foster informed citizen participation and engage disconnected citizens in political and policy processes, examined through empirical analysis and social experiments. The research pursues two lines of enquiry – an examination of what is occurring within PB processes themselves, as well as an exploration of what takes place within the wider environment in which a PB process is situated.

The EU Structural Funds are instruments to support less developed regions, aiming to close the gap between Europe’s least and most developed regions. Their implementation is essential for the EU’s regional policy to achieve economic development. Empirical evidence indicates that the implementation rate of Structural Funds in Romania has been consistently low. However, at regional and local levels, a different pattern emerges. This thesis emphasises the critical roles of local political leadership and administrative capacity to explain the success of local authorities in securing EU resources in a context unfavourable to such an outcome.

From the 2007-13 programming period, financial instruments (FI) introduced a distinct new strand to CP governance. They created new structures and delegated implementation responsibilities to new actors. This thesis explores the implications of the new modes of governance for the relationships between actors and the relationship between delegation modes and public accountability in the delivery of FI. It contributes to principal-agent, multi-level governance and public accountability theory.

Networks are increasingly used by policy practitioners to implement public policy. However, evidence that network approaches to implementation are actually beneficial for policy performance is inconclusive. Only recently studies incorporate Social Network Analysis, allowing for the inclusion of specific structural network conditions and their relationship for performance. This research contributes to this growing area of study by exploring the relationship between network position and the performance of projects implemented under European Union Cohesion policy, the EU’s regional policy instrument.

The thesis investigates metropolitan governance in local development through a comparative study of integrated economic development policies in Polish functional urban areas. It focuses on the case of Integrated Territorial Investments (ITI), a new policy instrument introduced under European Union’s cohesion policy for the period 2014-2020 in order to promote sustainable urban development. This thesis aims to identify the political factors involved in inter-municipal collaboration during ITI implementation, and their impact on collaboration.