RELOCAL departs from the basic premise that localities and their functional spaces represent the contextual nexus where the relationship between individuals and spatial justice unfolds. RELOCAL defines localities as multifarious and porous, at the intersection of vertical, horizontal and transversal forces. Spatial justice is conceptualised as integrating social, spatial, temporal, distributive and procedural dimensions. The main ambition behind RELOCAL is an evidence-based advocacy of localist approaches to cohesion and other spatial development policies where the EU plays a key role. New conceptual frameworks as well as policy models and instruments are needed to promote the development of Cohesion and other EU policies into more locally sensitive opportunity structures. The ‘local’ plays an important role in the promotion of fairness, spatial justice and wellbeing in Europe and, in turn, functions as an important laboratory for the elaboration of European, national and sub-national policies addressing cohesion and spatial justice.
RELOCAL will result in a number of policy recommendations that will help to make EU Cohesion Policy and its deployment in regional contexts more efficient and relevant to civil society and the citizenry. First, RELOCAL will contribute to an understanding of the ways in which European regions are very different and diverse in terms of their socio-economic, institutional and cultural environments. Second, RELOCAL will provide knowledge and scientifically sound insights into good practices in communicative strategies and participatory practices with regard to the deployment of cohesion polices in diverse European regions.
The main objectives of RELOCAL are defined as follows: 1) contribute to new conceptual frameworks of territorial cohesion, 2) develop working and practicable definitions of spatial justice based on the local quality and availability of social opportunities, 3) provide critical evaluations of the substantive adequacy, local accessibility and development impacts of existing cohesion policies, 4) elaborate new policy and development models that bridge conflicts and trade-offs between regional development and governance models that address territorial cohesion and spatial justice across Europe, and 5) develop a new, empirically tested, theoretical framework for the relation between regional autonomy, decentralisation, local participation on the one hand and greater economic, political and social justice on the other.
