Experimentalist governance beyond European Territorial Cooperation and cohesion policy: macro-regional strategies of the European Union (EU) as emerging ‘regional institutions’?

ABSTRACT

Since 2009, the European Union (EU) has started to 'experiment' with new forms of territorial governance: Macro-regional strategies (MRS), such as the one for Baltic Sea Region, seek to mobilize a variety of actors and have resulted in a complex and dynamic governance architecture which can be conceived as a new 'regional institution' disposing of some form of authority and autonomy. We show that EU MRS are best conceived as test-bed for intergovernmentalizing cohesion policy - as well as its European Territorial Cooperation (ETC) objective - in a functional region, locking in previously established formats of regional cooperation and thereby going beyond cohesion policy and ETC. Thus, this paper identifies EU MRS as instances of experimentalist governance albeit still falling short on monitoring and evaluation of implementation. This weakness may ultimately jeopardize the macro-regional experiment altogether and, consequently, the development and consolidation of 'regional institutions' of the EU.

KEYWORDS:

• EU macro-regional strategies
• experimentalist governance
• regional institution
• European Territorial Cooperation (ETC)
• cohesion policy
• intergovernmental (regional) cooperation

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Kristine Kern (University of Potsdam), Sandra Lavenex (University of Geneva), Franziska Sielker (University of Cambridge), Jonathan Zeitlin (University of Amsterdam) and members of the Department of Political Science and Management at the University of Agder, in particular Thomas Henökl, Dag Ingvar Jacobsen, Romulo Pinheiro, Anne Elizabeth Stie and Jarle Trondal, as well as to two anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of this paper. We also would like to thank the many ‘practitioners’ working in the vast field of EU macro-regional strategies which took the time to speak with us. Finally, we are grateful to Andrianina Irina Randrianarivelo for providing a final round of proofreading.

Disclaimer

Jörg Mirtl contributed to this article in his own capacity. The views expressed are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Danube Strategy Point or the City of Vienna.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Interviews

Interview#1: Author’s interview with German Foreign Ministry official, Berlin, 30 May 2011.

Interview#2: Author’s interview with former official, Representation of Baden-Württemberg to the EU, Stuttgart, 31 July 2012.

Interview#3: Author’s interview with Republic of Moldova EU Mission official, Brussels, 18 September 2014.

Interview#4: Author’s interview with Swedish official, Prime Minister’s office, Stockholm, 11 January 2017.

Interview#5: Author’s interview with PAC, EUSBSR, 13 February 2014.

Interview#6: Author’s interview with representative of the state ministry of Baden-Württemberg, Stuttgart, 22 October 2014.

Notes

1. The Council of the Baltic Sea States was founded in 1992 and includes 11 member states (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Poland, Russia and Sweden) as well as a representative of the European Commission/European External Actin Service. Founded in 1989, the Central European Initiative represents a regional intergovernmental forum aiming to support European integration through cooperation amongst its member-states. Founded in 2008, the Regional Cooperation Council is a cooperation framework for the Western Balkans with 46 participants.

2. EU MRS and macro-regions have been addressed from the perspective of political science, geography and regional planning. The concept of soft spaces was forged in light of local planning processes in order to reflect the concurrent presence of both ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ spaces of governance. Since then, the concept has been applied to EU macro-regional strategies in various works (e.g. Faludi 2010; Metzger and Schmitt 2012; Stead 2011, 2014; Sielker and Rauhut 2018). Informality of institutional structures, variability of thematic areas and flexibility of participation are key characteristics of these soft spaces. This literature has implicit links to scholarly works on multi-level governance as put forth by, e.g. Hooghe and Marks (2003), Piattoni (2016) and others (see Stephenson 2013; Gänzle et al. 2018 for overviews). For a discussion of the difference between experimentalist governance, network governance as well as other forms of governance in the area of EU MRS, see Gänzle et al. 2018).

3. The Adriatic and Ionian Initiative (AII) was established at the Summit on Development and Security on the Adriatic and Ionian Seas, held in the Italian city of Ancona (Italy) in 2000. attended by the Heads of States and Governments of Italy, Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece and Slovenia. Today, it has eight members: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Italy, Montenegro, Serbia and Slovenia. The Alpine Convention is an international treaty between the Alpine Countries (Austria, France, Germany, Italy, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Slovenia and Switzerland) as well as the EU, for the sustainable development and protection of the Alps.

4. The participating states are Austria, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Germany (Baden-Württemberg & Bavaria), Hungary, the Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia and the four Western oblasti of Ukraine.

5. With regard to this, it must be emphasised that these objectives – at least for the EU member states participating in EU macro-regional strategies – are already considered in the framework of the EU2020 Strategy and the European Semester, within which recommendations for the member-states are issued. (ESI) Funds need to be aligned in correspondence with these recommendations, which are proposed by the Commission and finally issued by the Council. Similar procedures apply in the framework of enlargement and neighbourhood policies, e.g. with the SEE2020 strategy.

6. Priority Area 9, ‘People and Skills’.

7. The Central European Initiative (CEI) and the Regional Cooperation Council (RCC) are both Regional Organisations involved in the Southeast Europe 2020 Strategy.

8. See http://www.danube-region.eu/contact/priority-area-coordinators and http://www.balticsea-region-strategy.eu/contacts.

9. This task is currently carried out by the Interact Program, an interregional program of the EU. Learning processes from one Strategy to another can be identified on the level of civil society involvement – e.g. the EUSDR ‘Participation Day’ of stakeholders, that was subsequently ‘copied’ by the EUSBSR –, and projects – e.g. the GaYA and CaSYPoT projects dealing with youth participation in MRS in the Alps and the Baltic Sea respectively – or with regards to networks. A network of Managing Authorities of the ESF was established in the Danube region following the EUSBSR example.

10. If EU MRS are to go beyond the European Territorial Cooperation Goal and to include also investment programs, the national state level has to consider this in the planning. In the Common Provisions Regulation (1303/2013), this is made possible especially via article 96.3 and its annex 7.3.

11. The CBSS Secretariat co-coordinates one policy area (Policy Area Secure) and two horizontal actions (Neighbours and Climate).

12. With regards to the Alpine Region, Plangger (2018) shows that MRS may help to increase the potential for empowerment of constitutionally and economically stronger regions in the EU as they change the mosaic of rules and relationships that make up the EU.