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.

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Katharina Stöger for her active participation in data collection. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the AESOP-ACSP Joint Congress, 15–19 July 2013 in Dublin.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Research Fund of Luxembourg [Grant No. C09/SR/03] (MetroNet project).

ORCID

Christophe Sohn http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2448-288X

Notes

1 According to Burstein (1991, p. 328), a policy domain is “a component of the political system organized around substantive issues”.

2 Information exchange includes all exchanges through personal interaction, phone, email, social media or the circulation of documents that is targeted towards a specific person/officer within an organization. This does not include emails to lists or generally distributed memos but rather the information targeted to individuals in specific organizations.

3 “CENTROPE” (in uppercase) refers to the CBC project, whereas “Centrope” (in lowercase) refers to the cross-border region.

4 In addition to the 27 organisations interviewed, two actors that are part of the policy network but that could not be interviewed (Centrope Office Slovakia and Ecoplus) were added for the structural analysis.

5 Europaforum was established by the City of Vienna in 1995 and is headed by the Viennese Mayor and Governor. VBA was founded by the City of Vienna in 1982 and is the executive branch of the city in many CBC projects involving business promotion.