Saturday, March 15, 2014
Hampton (Omni Shoreham)
The European level pro-poor policy has been one of the main and exceptional outcomes of the European integration process. The policy is currently under close scrutiny in view of further integration of jointly addressing poverty-related issues, and particularly marginalization in education, and policy up-scaling in the next European planning cycle (2014-2020). The principal instrument of the pro-poor policy is the European Social Fund (ESF), which has recently expanded to new member states from Central and Eastern Europe. This study comparatively investigates the efficiency of the national systems from five countries (Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Slovakia) to disburse ESF funding for education. It explores the normative regulations and the operational management providing access to funding for vulnerable groups, with a special emphasis on the situation of the Roma school-age children. This research is based on a mixed-methods design, employing a self-constructed dataset combining information the educational projects granted funding through structural funds and a qualitative analysis of the implementation of the projects and their outcomes. Our findings indicate that there are strong selectivity effects both at the level of national managing authorities and at the level of providers, with project objectives reflecting the prioritization of easy-to-involve subgroups rather than the most vulnerable. This puts into perspective the systematic unequal opportunities sub-groups like the Roma experience in the case of current arrangements of the European pro-poor policy, and the wide range of opportunities that are missed to break the inter-generational transmission of vulnerability to poverty in the European Union.
