Within SEERC, a social and political issues group brings together a range of disciplines including sociology, political science, social policy, psychology, geography and the humanities to explore the regional political and social context and processes associated with EU accession. Emphasis is, in particular, on promoting inter-disciplinary approaches to the complex social and political issues facing the region in the context of processes of globalisation and Europeanisation. Among the current research concerns of staff and doctoral students are: international actors and cross-border regional development; the Europeanisation of social policy and national adaptations in SEE; migration in SEE; and multi-level governance and policy transfer.
This workshop brought together political scientists and social policy analysts from University of Sheffield and City College (the SEERC partners), political and social scientists from several countries of the region, invited scholars from the UK and elsewhere in Europe, together with SEERC based research students. It had five broad aims:
- To explore the utility of the concepts of multi-level governance and policy transfer for understanding the policy making process in SEE.
- To begin to describe and capture the shifting architecture of multilevel governance and international organisation intervention in the region
- To examine the applicability of these concepts to a number of specific policy areas such as: social policy, migration policy, regional policy and environmental policy
- To form small working groups to develop regional networks to bid for research funds in this field over the next few months.
- To plan the SEERC web based portal of policy information emerging from this project.
The aim of the ensuing research programme was not only to understand the policy making process in the region but also to better inform and equip policy actors in the region to act within this complex multi-level, multi-actor, multi-sited policy context.
