The deep crisis in the euro zone influenced the recent reform of European cohesion policy for the funding period 2014-2020. The policy has to obey the constraints of tight budgets. The Commission reacted to this challenge by implementing new instruments to increase efficiency and effectiveness. This was accompanied by a double change of meaning and function: (1) having been the traditional policy of multi-level governance in the European Union, in which the role of member states has been limited by the Commission and the regions, the reformed policy today shows slow centralisation tendencies and, consequently, a strengthening of the EU institutions at the expense of room to manoeuvre for the regions. (2) The European Structural Funds seem to become more and more the financial instrument to pursue the European economic and employment policy objectives; the classical cohesion and convergence objectives increasingly are being replaced by the objectives of the European growth and jobs strategy, Europe 2020.
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