How can public policies facilitate local cooperation? Insights from the EU’s wine policy

Decentralised cooperation is key for achieving a range of policy goals, but we still know relatively little about how to create it in low-trust, institutionally weak settings. This article develops an account of Facilitative Overarching Institutional Frameworks (FOIFs) as macro-level institutions that abate the obstacles to local cooperation. Through qualitative evidence collected via fieldwork, it is shown that the EU’s wine policy is a good example of a FOIF, and that it has crucially contributed to the puzzling emergence of demanding forms of local cooperation in the Greek wine sector. When combined with favourable local conditions, and particularly with local leadership, as in Santorini, a FOIF can have transformative implications for local cooperation. When local leadership is absent, as in Lemnos, the final degree of local cooperation will be more limited. While the rareness of embedded policymaking in Greece inhibits the adoption of public policies that favour decentralised cooperation, in the wine sector the EU’s system of subsidies and geographical indications partially compensates for these for domestic institutional deficiencies. The article contributes to our knowledge about the emergence of decentralised cooperation in adverse circumstances and improves our understanding of the effects of transnational integration regimes on local governance arrangements.