Territorial development in today’s Romania: the strenuous quest for a European patterned regionalization

Abstract

The rationale of this paper would be extracted from the fact that a regional policy, in the full European patterned comprehensive sense, was never thoroughly pursued in Romania since joining EU in 2007. Our research try to evaluate if there are any preliminary historical assets in order to ease the process of modern regionalization and further on to investigate the policies that were officially implemented in order to comply with the overall EU territorial developmental framework. Last but not least we investigate the ad-hoc approaches of several of the local public administrators in the country, innovative approaches conceived in order to mend the evident lack of consistency of governmental public policies in this area. Within this respect our endeavor is to benchmark the overall progress of the country towards genuine regional development to some recently taken steps by some local administrative bodies, steps that already proved to be lucrative for a few counties in North-Western Romania.