Macro-regional Strategies, Cohesion Policy and Regional Cooperation in the European Union: Towards a Research Agenda

Abstract

Since 2009, the European Union has developed strategies for the Baltic Sea, Danube, Adriatic-Ionian and Alpine macro-regions. These macro-regional strategies represent a new tool of European Union governance that seeks to combine the community's territorial cooperation and cohesion policy repertoire with intergovernmental 'regional cooperation' involving European Union member and partner countries. By establishing comprehensive governance architectures for cross-sectoral and trans-boundary policy coordination in areas such as transport infrastructure and environmental protection, macro-regional strategies seek to mobilise European Union member and non-member states alike in promoting and harmonising territorial and trans-governmental cooperation. Both the macro-regional strategies and the macro-regions themselves have been met with increasing interest across several disciplines, including geography, regional planning, political science and public administration, triggering questions and debates on issues such as their impacts on existing practices of territorial cooperation and their relation to previously established forms of regional cooperation. Authored by scholars based in the above-mentioned fields of study, this contribution seeks to take stock of research on the subject to date, reflect on conceptual starting points and highlight new directions for future research in the political sciences.

The Politics of the EU Urban Agenda: Mobilising the ‘Right to the City’ for European Governance?

“…Since 2003, triannual EU Urban Audits have reported the urban statistics collected by Eurostat from the MSs, although considerable information gaps remained (Balducci and Fedeli 2008). To improve responsiveness by evidence-based EU policy, a new experimental approach for informal coordination has evolved from social and economic policies (Zeitlin 2016), European macro-regions (Gänzle et al 2019) and EU cohesion policy. In order to make 'policies more efficient and inclusive' by 'addressing the gap between general policy objectives and local conditions, '(e)xperimentalist governance theory proposes a virtuous feedback loop between policy design, experimentalist implementation, the pooling and sharing of experiences, reflexive learning, and framework adaptation' (Telle 2017, 16-17).…”

Enhancing Sustainability and Resilience through Multi-Level Infrastructure Planning

“…However, there are currently very few studies affording implementation strategies that offer this balance between local adaptive capacity and the comprehensive perspective demanded for resilient planning. Ganzle et al [32] pointed out the need for research specifically aimed at providing strategies for addressing the coordination problem arising from the implementation of integrated planning within multi-level governmental frameworks. Newman et al [31] explored the effect of different decentralization levels in water systems, finding that a system's performance may be sensitive to the level of decentralization adopted, while Roozbahani et al [33] evaluated the risks of urban water supply systems from bottom to top by means of hierarchical structure analysis.…”

‘Experimental Union’ and Baltic Sea cooperation: the case of the European Union’s Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR)

“…The overlaps between the academic debates in geography, regional planning and political science are considerable as they put into question 'the character of relations between different actors, levels and territories and the way administrations, political and private stakeholders seek to identify appropriate governance arrangements' (Gänzle, Stead, Sielker, & Chilla, 2018, http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1478929918781982). Whereas classical theories of regional integrationsuch as neo-functionalism and liberal intergovernmentalismhave been interested in disclosing the main driving forces of integration (Piattoni, 2016), governance approaches are interested in procedural aspects and effects of regional integration on member states and regions.…”