Abstract
This chapter charts an in-depth description of how the European Union (EU) Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland (the EU PEACE programme) was structured and implemented as a model for peacebuilding and regional development. It will reflect on how the initiative promoted the cross-border and peacebuilding activities of networks. Such activity, implemented from the bottom-up, gave functional value to regional cross-border governance and helped to ameliorate conflict by providing positive-sum outcomes for cross-community relations. This chapter argues that EU officials, civil servants, and policy networks in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, embraced a networked style of metagovernance as a means to implement the PEACE initiatives. Administration and policy-processes must be understood as interaction processes in which actors at all levels exchange information about problems, preferences, trade-off goals, and resources. At the same time, networks and grassroot organisations, while supported by the EU in their attempts at carving out a role for themselves in the peace process, were subjected to the omnipresent ‘hand’ of the national governments, which fits with the metagovernance perspective.
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Lagana, G. (2021). The European Union Programme for Peace and Reconciliation in Northern Ireland. In: The European Union and the Northern Ireland Peace Process. Palgrave Studies in European Union Politics. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59117-5_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59117-5_6
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