COMMON COHESION POLICY AND MULTILEVEL DECISION-MAKING IN EUROPEAN UNION

One of the most significant results of European convergence is an increase in the number of channels for the "European" policy activities of subnational actors. These actors are no longer limited to bilateral political relations and national i.e. state actors, but are to cooperate and communicate with different actors in different arenas of decision-making and make use of various channels of influencing the European policy process. The question of subnational mobilization has become extremely significant in the theory of European convergence, particularly following the major reform of the EU cohesion policy of 1988 and the introduction of the partnership principle. In that sense, the mobilization of subnational actors is closely linked to the evolution of the EU cohesion policy. It should be noted that despite this, the EU cohesion policy is primarily the essential catalyst of subnational mobilization and thus not "exclusively" linked to the public policy realm; it has increasingly become a prominent feature of other public-policy areas. And finally, hand in hand with the elaboration of the common cohesion policy (related to subnational mobilization) the concept of the so-called multilevel governance was formulated in the context of the European integration, in the sense of identifying the environment in which the processes of the formation and the implementation of common European policies are today taking place.