Paper long abstract:

Since the mid-1990s developmental corporations proliferated throughout Greece. Most of these corporations constitute institutional bodies that were founded by local or regional authorities and other public or private institutions not so much in order to implement European Union policies, as to locate E.U funding opportunities. Aims of these corporations are the promotion of local and/or regional development, the conduct of market researches, as well as the consultation of businesses and administrative agencies in effective management. While these corporations uniformly constitute promoters of E.U forms of governance, they re-produce the technicalities of a formal perception of development deeply entrenched in the new technopolitics of the market: the promotion of scientific and professional erudition, the application of ISO criteria both to themselves and to agencies they support, all speak a language of expertise that decides on what constitutes a marketable "product" and how the quality of this product is to be evaluated.