John Bachtler was an invited plenary speaker at the first European Conference on Regional Development 'Paths and Crossroads of Regional Development in the European Union' organised on 20-21 April 2012 by the Department of History & International Relations at the University of Craiova, in cooperation with the universities of Bucharest and Oulu, Finland.
The conference was organised to raise the profile of regional development in Romania and to promote international exchanges on the opportunities, limitations and challenges of regional development policies in old and new EU Member States.
John's paper - EU Cohesion policy at the crossroads: How much will change? - discussed the context for the current debate on reforming EU Structural and Cohesion policy and provided an assessment of the European Commission's proposals as well as Member State reactions.