Collaborative Governance And Urban Administrative Capacity: Evidence From Eu-Funded Urban Development Projects In Romania

This study examines the relationship between collaborative governance and administrative capacity in implementing EU-funded urban development projects in Romania. It compares six municipalities - Oradea, Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Craiova, Baia Mare, and Galați - selected because each is confirmed, by direct extraction from the European Commission's Kohesio database, to be the beneficiary of a substantial, multi-project Cohesion Policy portfolio in its own right. The analysis prioritises direct, official sources (Kohesio, Regulations on Organisation and Functioning, Council decisions and mayoral dispositions, census data) over indirect ones (press coverage, reported statements), and states explicitly, source by source, which tier each claim rests on. Two composite, exploratory indices - a Collaborative Governance Index (CGI) and an Administrative Capacity Index (ACI) - are constructed from qualitative evidence, while a Fund Absorption Rate (FAR) is calculated directly from Kohesio's EU contribution-per-capita figures for all six cities on a single consistent basis. The findings show that richer collaborative-governance ecosystems and more developed administrative infrastructure generally coincide with stronger EU fund mobilisation, but the relationship is not linear: the city with the richest collaborative ecosystem ranks only second-lowest on per capita fund mobilisation, while a low-ranking city on governance ranks second on FAR. Set against a literature that studies administrative capacity mainly at national or regional level, the article's main contribution is empirical and methodological rather than theoretical: a transparently sourced, city-level test of how collaborative governance and administrative capacity relate to EU fund mobilisation in a Central and Eastern European member state, illustrating a source-hierarchy approach that later, larger comparative work could extend beyond Romania.