The Impact of EU-Integrated Urban Development Initiatives: Research Strategies Beyond ‘Good Practices’

Abstract

AbstractAfter reviewing previous research strategies applied to evaluate the impacts of EU urban initiatives, and previous evaluative assessments of similar place-based initiatives, this chapter proposes the use of ‘controlled comparisons’ to perform this crucial task for the urban dimension of the European Cohesion Policy: analyses should compare changes before and after interventions between territorial targets and appropriate contrafactual. Previous studies on policy effectiveness have analysed programme outcomes or case studies, but their results do not provide information about initiatives’ impacts due to the lack of contrafactual comparison. Besides, urban initiatives establish some ‘eligibility criteria’ to select their territorial targets. Therefore, contrafactual should be chosen according to the criteria. Based on these ideas, this chapter applies propensity score matching to select appropriate experimental and control groups to evaluate the impact of EU urban initiatives in Spain. The following chapters use the chosen neighbourhoods (experimental and control groups) to perform impact analyses using different methodological approaches.