Macro-regional Strategies, Cohesion Policy and Regional Cooperation in the European Union: Towards a Research Agenda
| Date | 01 May 2019 |
| DOI | 10.1177/1478929918781982 |
| Published date | 01 May 2019 |
| Author | Franziska Sielker,Tobias Chilla,Stefan Gänzle,Dominic Stead |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2018
Article
Political Studies Review
2019, Vol. 17(2) 161 –174
Macro-regional Strategies,
© The Author(s) 2018
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Cohesion Policy and Regional
https://doi.org/10.1177/1478929918781982
DOI: 10.1177/1478929918781982
journals.sagepub.com/home/psrev
Cooperation in the European
Union: Towards a Research
Agenda
Stefan Gänzle1, Dominic Stead2,
Franziska Sielker3 and Tobias Chilla4
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.
Keywords
European Union, macro-regional strategies, European transnational cooperation, regional
cooperation
Accepted: 10 May 2018
1Department of Political Science and Management, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway
2Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
3Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
4Institute of Geography, Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany
Corresponding author:
Stefan Gänzle, University of Agder, Gimlemoen 25H, NO- 4604 Kristiansand, Norway.
Email: stefan.ganzle@uia.no
162
Political Studies Review 17(2)
Introduction
The development of the European Union’s (EU) unique system of governance has long
been a key concern of scholars in the fields of political science, geography and regional
studies. The introduction of EU macro-regional strategies since 2009 represents one of
the most recent products of EU governance. In short, they seek to establish comprehen-
sive frameworks for multi-objective cooperation and coordination of cross-cutting poli-
cies involving several actors in a territorially defined ‘macro-region’. Macro-regions,
such as the Baltic Sea region, are delimited according to geographical features or ‘com-
mon pool resources’ (Ostrom, 1990) that shape the (perception of) opportunities, chal-
lenges and, consequently, debates and discourses of the countries concerned.
Macro-regional strategies possess a hybrid set of features, partly rooted in EU cohesion
policy (Gänzle, 2016; McMaster and van der Zwet, 2016; Stead, 2014a, 2014b), which
has had a significant impact not only on the emergence and activities of EU macro-regions
themselves, but also on various activities in the area of cross-border cooperation (CBC)
(Perkmann, 2003) and, most recently, the European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation
(EGTCs)1 at a smaller territorial scale (Engl, 2016; Nadalutti, 2013). Most importantly,
however, macro-regional strategies are also closely intertwined with established practices
of intergovernmental ‘regional’ integration in Europe (Cottey, 1999; Dangerfield, 2016;
Gänzle and Kern, 2016a, 2016b) and can even be ‘linked with wider processes of globali-
zation’ (Ágh, 2016: 145; Ágh et al., 2010).
This review article critically engages with a growing body of research and literature
on EU macro-regional strategies and relates it to dominant theoretical approaches in the
fields of political science, geography and regional planning in an interdisciplinary per-
spective. For reasons of space, we do not engage with the full range of scholarly litera-
ture on EU cohesion policy and regional cooperation. Macro-regional cooperation
strategies are of interest to political science as they wield new and additional influences
on European integration dynamics as well as being a new form of (hitherto neglected)
regionalism in the EU (Keating, 2013). Scholars from geography and regional plan-
ning, in turn, have begun to reflect on this new form of cooperation as it is closely
interwoven with EU ambitions to influence patterns of spatial development and territo-
rial cohesion across Europe. Both geography and regional planning scholars have also
started to reflect on the underlying conceptualisation of space that is associated with
macro-regional cooperation arrangements. Within political science, on the other hand,
more emphasis has been placed on theorising about new forms of government and gov-
ernance in relation to macro-regional strategies, whereas geographers and regional
planners have focused more on issues and debates surrounding territoriality. The litera-
ture review reveals that both disciplines offer a range of different starting points for
considering and explaining similar phenomena, such as the role and relation of actors
at different levels, without being completely separate and distinct. Our reflection under-
lines the potentials of an interdisciplinary approach.
The research article is divided into three main parts. The first part provides a brief
background to the development process and nature of the EU macro-regional strategies.
Second, literature from the policy sciences is discussed, particularly on multi-level gov-
ernance (MLG) and European integration, and from geography and regional planning,
focusing specifically on the interlinked issues of policy rescaling, soft policy spaces and
re-territorialisation are reviewed. Finally, the third part identifies new directions for future
research on EU macro-regional strategies.
Gänzle et al.
163
EU Macro-regional Strategies and Macro-regional
Cooperation: What It Is
Macro-regional strategies first entered the stage when – shortly after the 2004 enlarge-
ment of the EU – several members of the European Parliament proposed an initiative to
consolidate old and new member states of the Baltic Sea region as a group inside the EU
(Schymik and Krumrey, 2009). At that time, some of the traditional frameworks for inter-
governmental cooperation in the region, such as the Council of the Baltic Sea States,
faced increasing challenges in terms of their function as intergovernmental platforms
(Etzold, 2010; Gänzle and Kern, 2016c). The initiative was subsequently embraced by the
European Commission and developed into a new form of regionalised strategies, pro-
grammes and institutions in Europe. In some academic literature, macro-regional strate-
gies are discussed as a response to pan-European documents such as the Lisbon,
Gothenburg and Europe 2020 strategies, the European Spatial Development Perspective
(ESDP) and other European territorial cooperation activities (e.g. Dubois et al., 2009;
Dühr, 2011; Stead, 2011). Cross-border and interregional cooperation in general, and
INTERREG programmes – an important funding source for fostering territorial coopera-
tion projects in the EU – in particular, are widely seen as a precursor to the large-scale
macro-regional cooperation arrangements at the supra-national scale (Dubois et al., 2009;
Stead et al., 2016).
Macro-regional strategies provide integrated frameworks for cooperation to address
‘common challenges’ (European Commission (CEC), 2016: 2) in specific territories. The
strategies aim to coordinate the development of policy goals in international context, and at
the same time offer a governance structure to support implementation. As opposed to other
institutionalised forms of cooperation in the EU (e.g. the Community initiative which aims
to stimulate interregional cooperation, INTERREG) macro-regional cooperation is based
on a political strategy rather than a funding strategy. Moreover, the strategic ambition of
macro-regions is more comprehensive than international conventions, which provide a con-
tractual framework often in relation to environmental goals (e.g. the Alpine Convention or
the International Commission for the Protection of the Danube River).
A key narrative deployed by the European Commission, especially in the early stages
of framing the macro-regional strategies, was the three no’s: no new EU legislation, no
new EU institutions and no new EU budget should be used to provide direct and immedi-
ate support to EU macro-regional strategies. As such, macro-regional strategies build
extensively on existing rules, governance arrangements and financial resources both
nationally and internationally. Four EU macro-regional strategies for the Baltic Sea
Region (2009), the Danube Region (2011), the Adriatic-Ionian Region (2014) and the
Alpine Region...
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