The time could not be more propitious to examine how EU spending can be used to promote well-being. More and more people in Europe are debating what the EU can do for the citizens of its member states, and what benefits it has really generated on their behalf. We live in an era of increasing public debate about the EU (Hooghe and Marks, 2009), where populist rhetoric is regularly deployed to exacerbate people's anxieties and threat perceptions linked to economic insecurity (Hameleers et al, 2017). The UK's decision to leave (so-called Brexit) has shown how economic divides have contributed to an erosion of favourable attitudes towards the EU, underlining that citizens care deeply about distributional issues (Algan et al, 2017).

Little is known about the extent to which EU spending actually improves people's lives, despite notable evaluation studies (Bachtler et al, 2013, 2019). Most research on EU regional funding effects focuses on gross domestic product (GDP) growth or convergence. This approach is attractive insofar as it expresses a society's wealth in a single measure. However, it neither considers the distribution of wealth nor the well-being and future prospects of individual people. The central argument in this chapter is about the effects of EU social investment in individuals at different stages of the life course on regional well-being. I argue that where EU spending reaches poor and otherwise disadvantaged people, by strengthening capabilities, it will enhance regional well-being. Under the current legal framework, however, and in the light of existing funding practices, more prosperous areas within the regions and the wealthier segments of society receive most of the benefits.

The chapter begins by proposing a concept of ‘regional well-being’ in the sense of a state of distributive justice in the regions, in which every individual has the capability to achieve the quality of life they are striving for. It then develops the argument by drawing on insights in political philosophy and welfare economics. The chapter closes by discussing the context factors that govern how EU spending effects unfold.

Conceptualizing regional well-being

To define regional well-being, it is useful to consider previous conceptions of well-being offered in well-being research. Subjective notions of well-being – often referred to as ‘a good quality of life’, a person's ‘welfare’, or ‘a person's good’ – are concerned with individual cognitive and/ or affective states.