Mariola Ferenc’s research while affiliated with Polish Academy of Sciences and other places

The main aim of this paper is to provide a comparative analysis of regional policies dealing with peripheral rural areas in the Visegrad countries from a historical perspective. As it is demonstrated in the paper despite the common political and ideological framework the goals and means of regional policy remained rather different in these countries during state-socialism. The systemic changes demanded the re-conceptualisation of regional development policy and the reconfiguration of the institutional background. As the comparative policy analysis showed in the early 1990s there was a lack of coherent regional policy that would efficiently mitigate growing regional disparities or foster regional competitiveness. The conceptual, legal and institutional foundation of the new regional policy took place in the second half of the 1990s, with some time lag among the countries. In the formulation of strategic documents regarding regional policy the foreseen EU accession played a very important role. The preparation of national development plans were based on the EU’s standardized development handbooks, therefore a considerable similarity among the new member states’ regional policy documents can be observed. One can say that earlier differences in regional development priorities were gradually eliminated by the European integration among the new member states. However, rural areas were considered in regional economic development policies only in the context of agriculture and tourism development. In addition to local infrastructural development, preservation of natural and cultural heritage, job creation only agriculture and tourism were defined for EU and national subsidies.

The aim of the ESPON Programme is to produce and disseminate scientific information concerning the European space in terms of economy, society, environment, and governance, which is practical for policy and decision makers at the European, national and regional levels. Under the Detecting Territorial Potentials and Challenges project (ESPON DeTeC) materials on the selected methods, which appeared to be most useful for policy makers, have been collected and subsequently verified within regional laboratories conducted in six European regions. The paper presents the process of selecting and validating the methods, as well as the results o f regional laboratories and best practices .

Many scholars question the purportedly international character of the most prestigious journals of geography, particularly those concerned with human geography. These, in their opinion, are dominated by British and American geography. The goal of this article is to assess the affiliation distribution of the authors of articles and the editorial boards of selected geographical publications and to compare the results with previous assessments of a similar kind. The analysis pertains to those geographical journals that received the highest impact rating from the Institute for Scientific Information. The results confirm those obtained by previous studies; over 70% of all articles published in highly respected geographical journals were written by authors representing British and American academic institutions. This trend carries over to the structure of the respective publications’ editorial boards and staff, also Anglo-American in their majority. It would appear, as is argued, that maintaining such a structure creates numerous threats to the development of a global discourse in the area of geography.