The impact of European spatial development perspective (ESDP) on multi-level governance:

Official URL: http://risc01.sabanciuniv.edu/record=b1164367 (Table of Contents)

Methods and approaches to the European integration process have long been discussed and analyzed in the academic literature. One such methadology, the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) presents an innovative and novel approach to European integration. As a response to increasing interdependency and the forces of globalization, Member States of the EU have started to engage in a cooperative manner. Issues such as spatial planning, which are beyond Community’s competence and scope, began to enter into the European agenda though, albeit through untraditional procedures. Initiatives such as ESDP reveal alternative practices that have expanded the scope of European cooperation. Rather than regulatory and binding practices of cooperation, ESDP instead presents the importance of political will and the formulation of frameworks open to interpretation as the fundamental principles of cooperation which aims to serve the interests of all the parties included. Accordingly; the relationships, functioning and transnational cooperation seem to provide an added value to the multi-level governance approach in explaining the European integration processes. The impact of and the motivation for ESDP in two powerful agents in the European arena Germany-- federal state-- and France-- unitary state, exhibits, though partially and with reservations, the validity of evolving alternative methods and approaches to European integration.