POLITICI PUBLICE, DEZVOLTARE ȘI REALITĂȚI SOCIO-ECONOMICE, pages: 271 - 285, 2026

Do Intercommunity Development Associations Favour Polycentric Development? An Analysis of Territorial Policies of the EU

Doi: https://doi.org/10.58603/RWEP2986

Rezumat: For more than two decades now, amongst some of the concepts put forth by informal and official documents of the EU we find polycentric development. The term has been extensively studied in many research papers sparking interest in other parts of the world too. On the other hand, in preparation of Romania’s integration into the EU, Intercommunity Development Associations (IDA) were included in the Romanian legislation to facilitate collaboration between various administrative units of Romania, to address the shortcomings of the administrative fragmentation of its local administrative level and the financial limitations that most rural administrative units face.
The purpose of this paper is to understand whether these territorial structures lead to polycentric development or, on the contrary, they enhance the polarizing effect of existing urban centres. To reach our conclusions, we rely mainly on quantitative methods. Our research covers the entire territory of Romania, as we attempted to get sufficient details that describe existing IDAs and that characterize the local administrative units of Romania.