In May 2007 the European Commission published the Fourth Cohesion Report which provided an extensive overview of how cohesive the EU actually is, what the convergence trends are, what challenges lie ahead and also what role cohesion policy has played in contributing towards strengthened cohesion among the EU regions and Member States. his was followed by the official launching of the debate on the future of cohesion policy at the Fourth Cohesion Forum organised in Brussels at the end of September 2007.

In May 2007 the European Commission published the Fourth Cohesion Report which provided an extensive overview of how cohesive the EU actually is, what the convergence trends are, what challenges lie ahead and also what role cohesion policy has played in contributing towards strengthened cohesion among the EU regions and Member States. This was followed by the official launching of the debate on the future of cohesion policy at the Fourth Cohesion Forum organised in BruIn the context of the debate launched in September 2007 at the 4th EU Cohesion Forum, the Slovenian Presidency of the European Union is organising a conference on the future of Cohesion Policy, in Maribor, to be held in April.

The main focus will be to clearly formulate questions on the Policy's scope in relation to other European policy areas, its objectives and implementation. The Presidency has outlined a number of questions which will provide structure to the conference, promising an uninhibited debate.

The Slovene Presidency will build on the Portuguese approach to the debate, i.e. that at this early stage of the financial perspective 2007-2013 attention needs to be given to the conceptual issues which will contribute to further improvement of the cohesion policy impact. Cohesion policy also needs to be put in a broader EU policy context which means that we cannot avoid addressing the questions of appropriate scope of the cohesion policy relative to other EU priorities.

The Commission, for its part, will present the first results obtained from analysing contributions received in connection with the public debate which terminated at the end of January.

Background

Both the Cohesion Report as well as the debate have thus far shown that there is extensive evidence of the necessity and positive impact of cohesion policy. In this regard a number of arguments have been raised ranging from the significant contribution cohesion policy makes as a reflection of solidarity in the EU to empirical estimations on the contribution of cohesion policy to growth and job creation.

Nevertheless, the discussion has also shown that there are some concerns as to whether all parts of cohesion policy are equally beneficial, whether cohesion policy will be able to respond to the challenges that lie ahead, both in terms of its objectives as well as its scope and, furthermore, to what extent it would be possible to make the management and implementation systems more streamlined and efficient.ssels at the end of September 2007.