After the recent Consortium Meeting in Kaunas, COHSMO is now submitting European Policy Brief no. 4.
Since Policy brief no. 3, the COHSMO-project has conducted case studies in the selected 21 specific case-locations – one rural, one sub-urban and one metropolitan location in each of the participating countries. 20 qualitative interviews has been conducted in each locality and divided across different types of important local actors: 5 with entrepreneurs and business-actors, 5 with community-actors and 10 with governance-actors, which amounts to a total of 210 COHSMO-interviews. Data has been condensed, and gently analyzed and delivered as D 4.4 and the COHSMO-team has started the subsequent tasks that are to result in D4.5, which is a discourse analysis of collected policy-documents from the case areas, and regional scales: policy strategy documents, reports, local documents generated by local stakeholders and evaluation reports from each case area. The principal idea is to provide a critical overview of current discourses which inform policy, in particular how territorial cohesion is constructed (or not constructed) as a relevant object and if it is at what scale and to locate scope and relevant scale of policies in terms of territorial cohesion. Focus is on analysing policy documents and strategies and on identifying symbolic, innovative spearhead projects and approaches. Further, the policy analysis should, together with D4.4, result in Task 4.10 (topic list for the 3×5 interviews with policy makers, to be conducted in autumn 2019). Summing up – the COHSMO-project is in the midst of the analyzing process of the Work Package 4. Thus, Policy Brief no. 4 reports some of the crosscutting findings and some of the methodological reflections that the analysis until now has resulted in. The results of the critical discourse-analysis will be presented, further elaborated on and tested in the coming phases of the COHSMO-project.
The coming Policy Brief will elaborate on the above and will be published here on the website as soon as it has been submitted and approved.