EU regional policy appears to be a fertile ground for the integration of social goals such as poverty alleviation and social inclusion. It has a long history of pursuing social cohesion and an emphasis on active labour market policies, such as supporting vocational training schemes and micro-entrepreneurs, that resonates well with the idea of social investment. However, social investment is widely seen as a part of domestic welfare state policy, and there is strong pressure for this to remain in the hands of national governments (de la Porte and Natali, 2018).

Against this background, this chapter provides an in-depth analysis of the integration of social goals into EU regional policy, in terms of both formal rules and practice. A growing number of scholars have called for a more integrated approach by the EU that promotes growth and social goals at the same time (Vandenbroucke et al, 2011; Hemerijck, 2013; Heins and de la Porte, 2014; Aranguiz, 2019). Nonetheless, there has been no comprehensive analysis of the degree to which social goals have really been integrated into EU regional policy, which after all is the EU's main tool to enhance growth.

This chapter fills that gap. It provides an overview of how the regional fund implementation processes function and analyses social ‘mainstreaming’ in EU regional policy. The concept of mainstreaming is useful here as it refers to the integration of issues into the institutions and policies of a particular organization. The term has been used extensively in the literatures on gender (Hafner-Burton and Pollack, 2009) and EU environmental mainstreaming in the EU (Dupont, 2016), but not yet in the context of social and regional policies. I discuss how and when social goals have been mainstreamed into EU regional policy and the European Structural and Investment Funds that undergird that policy. By way of conclusion, the chapter discusses implications for the EU's ability to pursue social goals in its growth policies.

Regional policymaking

While 1988 is considered the watershed of EU regional policy, the 1992 reform taking effect in 1993 in conjunction with the Maastricht Treaty strengthened the goal of economic and social cohesion in regional policy as we know it today. The resources allocated to regional policy in the period 1988– 93 were doubled to one fifth of the Community budget, making the structural funds the second-largest area of expenditure after the Common Agricultural Policy (Bache, 1998, ch. 4).