An organizational ecology approach to EGTC creation in East Central Europe

ABSTRACT

European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) are a legal instrument intended to facilitate institutional cross-border cooperation. Launched in 2006, EGTC creation was particularly swift in East Central Europe, albeit with significant variation between different border regions. The article adopts an organizational ecology perspective to explain this variation and argues that the level of organizational density inside a cross-border ecological niche is crucial for EGTC creation. The analysis draws on policy documents and semi-structured interviews with key stakeholders from four border areas in East Central Europe. It finds that lower levels of organizational density in unitary states constitute a favourable organizational environment for EGTC creation. However, rather than enhancing autonomous decision-making in the border region, we find evidence that unitary state support for EGTC creation reflects a political strategy to centralize control over cross-border cooperation.

KEYWORDS:

• Cohesion policy
• cross-border governance
• European Groupings of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC)
• organizational ecology

Acknowledgements

The research was partly conducted in the framework of the project ‘Socioeconomic and Political Responses to Regional Polarization in Central and Eastern Europe’ (RegPol²), coordinated by the Leibniz Institute for Regional Geography, Leipzig, Germany. In addition, a paper containing some of the data and arguments for this article was first presented at the fifth EUGEO Congress on the Geography in Europe, which took place in Budapest, Hungary on 30 August – 2 September 2015, at Eötvös Loránd University. We are grateful to comments from attendants at the conference, and the panel conveners and chairs Péter Balogh and Peter Schmitt. Stefan is grateful for the support he received during his fellowship at the CPS, especially to Lilla Jakobs, Violetta Zentai, and Andrew Cartwright. Finally, we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their insightful and constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Stefan Telle http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2827-0865

Sara Svensson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-4759-7505

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the People Programme (Marie Curie Actions) of the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme FP7/2007–2013/ under REA grant agreement n° 607022.