A Policy Network Approach to Cross-Border Metropolitan Governance: The Cases of Vienna and Bratislava

Abstract

This paper presents a structural analysis of the governance arrangements established between Vienna and Bratislava close to the Austrian -Slovak border. We unravel the metropolitan governance relationships built in the context of territorial debordering and critically assess the policy relevance of cross-border cooperation (CBC). We particularly focus on cross-border economic positioning as a policy domain of strategic importance in a neoliberal era marked by urban and regional entrepreneurialism. In order not to embed the analysis in a predefined territorial configuration or geographic scale, this paper argues for an approach based on policy networks. The key point is that those private and public actors involved in building cross-border regions are developing a diffuse form of governance that relies on a set of flexible and tangled connections that do not necessarily conform to the territorial boundaries of the states concerned. Based on original fieldwork and data on the exchange of information between the stakeholders involved in cross-border economic positioning, we use a social network analysis to describe the relational patterns of the policy network and complement the analysis with a qualitative assessment of actors' interests and strategies. The roles and positions of the actors reflect the sharp imbalances in interest and resources, highlighting the persistence of border-related barrier effects that hamper CBC initiatives between Vienna and Bratislava.

Political Participation of Local Publics in the Unemployment Field: A Comparison of Lyon and Turin

“…The main aim is to account for variations of political participation across a large range of organisations that engage in the unemployment field. In particular, our argument promotes the use of the relational approach already used in social movement scholarship (Diani 1992 andGould 1995;Diani and McAdam 2003;Diani and Bison 2004), but with a different emphasis derived from literature on governance (Cinalli 2007a;Christopoulos 2008;Christopoulos and Quaglia 2009;Feiock and Scholz 2010;Sohn and Giffinger 2015). Instead of using networks to understand the nature of social movements, the governance literature has used relational data to examine the different levels of actors' involvement in the political sphere.…”

Identifying Processes of Smart Planning, Governance and Management in European Border Cities. Learning from City-to-City Cooperation (C2C)

“…Moreover, these policy objectives seek a sustainable solution to the planning of areas such as infrastructure and transport planning, agriculture, and rural development, as well as to environmental issues-bearing in mind the particular situation of each region [9,11,[18][19][20].…”

Eurocity: From Political Construction to Local Demand… Or Vice-Versa?

“…However, the Eurocities, since they are initiatives with a different approach emerging from local authorities, are European integration projects with a certain novelty and a high level of experimentation. Various case studies of intercity cooperation have underscored that the launch of these projects arouses high expectations [38], and that some award-winning impacts have not been the desired ones, especially regarding the participation of local residents and that of actors which are non-institutional but vital for the legitimation of this model of governance [39][40][41][42][43]. These criticisms bolster the validity of the social approach (also known as the human approach) in the academic debate on cross-border cooperation [31], which stresses the importance of studying socio-cultural dynamics and factors and local perspectives, as well as their inclusion in cross-border cooperation projects.…”