Kasi-Blog

Last night, I finally finished calculating a survey on Regional Lobbyism. I conducted the survey in January 2006 in Brussels during an internship at the Bavarian Representation in Brussels. But then the exams in Bayreuth, the writing of my Bachelor-Thesis, followed by the travels to the US and then working in Berlin.

Even if I got only one fourth of the regional offices in Brussels to reply to my survey, the results are a very interesting start for further research. For instance, it is interesting to that for the regions the European Parliament and the European Commission are both very important for their lobbywork, but not the Council as such. If they have to deal with the council, they often go through their permanent representation.

It is also interesting to see that the Bavarian Representation (see the picture above) is by far an exception in Brussels. Most regional offices have only a few staff members which have to be complete all-rounders in all topics – something that is virtually impossible in Brussels.

The Bavarian government decided very early that for an effective representation of their interest on the European stage you need to have highly-trained, very specialised representatives coming from the Bavarian ministries.

As far as I know, the Bavarian representation is also one of the few Regional Office which are having a full internship program – most Regional Office only have one or two interns, not four to six at the same time as the Bavarians have.

I think I will write more in the Lobbyism-Wiki, but I would be grateful for people sharing with me their own experiences of the Regions in Brussels.

This entry was posted on Mittwoch, Mai 9th, 2007 at 18:00 and is filed under kasi-blog. Tags: bavaria, brussels, lobbyism, regional lobbyism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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