In the previous chapter, I showed that in the late 1980s and 1990s, there was a boom in the literature on the ‘Europe of the Regions’ (Bachtler and Michie, 1995; Loughlin, 2007). It was also in this context that the debate on methodological nationalism (Beck and Sznaider, 2006: 3) was advanced in sociology and attention was drawn to the subnational level as an independent research entity (Jeffery and Schakel, 2013). However, although the scholarship concentrated on subnational (mostly regional) levels as entities with their own voices and particular roles within the global or European multilevel system, it focused less on their interaction with the European level. As also outlined in the previous chapter, the subnational level in European countries has played a decisive interface role in the field of labour market policies, as the activation turn and the decentralisation wave strengthened the role of the subnational level, and consequently EU policies directly addressed it in their steering intentions.

However, this decisive role of the subnational level is still significantly under-conceptualised in the literature. Although the political science literature has extensively studied ‘the domestic adaptation to European regional integration’ (Vink and Graziano, 2007: 7) under the label of ‘Europeanisation’, most studies in this strand have focused on national policies, structures, actors or ideas and their responses to what was happening at the European level. It is only more recently that – particularly in the context of European funding – some scholars have also studied the subnational level from a Europeanisation perspective. Despite this, there is still a significant lack of comparative studies and analytical approaches with regard to subnational responses to the EU. For this reason, this chapter sets out to develop a conceptual perspective on the responses of the subnational level to European funding, first, drawing on the Europeanisation literature. However, given that this body of literature does not provide entirely satisfactory tools for capturing the specific role of the subnational level and particularly the processes of change that might be linked to the ESF, in a second step, I introduce a field theoretical perspective, which is then merged into a third step with the Europeanisation debate in order to develop a unique perspective on domestic responses to the ESF.