An Action Plan for the Mediterranean: a Case of EU Policy Transfer to the Mediterranean Basin

Abstract

Although for millennia the Mediterranean has facilitated the exchange of goods and people, in recent decades, it has been treated as a border between continents, nations and supranational institutions, with the European Union on one side and MENA region on the other. Yet pressing issues related to migration, climate change and pollution reveal problems with the border approach. In 1995, the Barcelona Process culminated in the creation of the Union for the Mediterranean (UfM) and the UfM Urban Agenda in an attempt to better connect countries around the Mediterranean. To concretise this agenda, TU Delft and the authors of this text were invited to work with DG-Regio, UNESCO, the EIB (European Investment Bank), and the ministries in charge of spatial planning in Member States, to draft the UfM Strategic Action Plan for Sustainable Urban Development. The goal of the Action Plan is to enhance the strategic and integrative value of spatial planning interventions in each country. Based on the personal reflections of the authors and the detailed communication with the institutions involved in the making of the plan, the article presents the history and the conceptual framework of the making of the UfM Strategic Action Plan. It concludes by highlighting the hurdles that the UfM Strategic Action Plan faces as a new transnational policy framework for the transfer of policy from the European Union to the MENA region (Middle East and the North of Africa). Such challenges are not only based on content, but they are also related to the frames and structures within which policy is developed and exchanged.

Keywords

• policy transfer
• new institutionalism
• transnational policy framework
• international relations
• mediterranean integration
• eu neighbourhood policy
• integrated urban development