Speaker
Description
Introduction and research problem
European Union Macro-Regional Strategies (MRS) have emerged as an innovative framework of territorial governance, designed to address shared challenges across transnational spaces characterized by common geographical, economic, and political features. Unlike traditional EU policy instruments, MRS operate under the Three-No principle – no new funds, no new legal frameworks, and no new institutions – relying on existing structures while promoting coordination across multiple policy fields. In this way, a flexible governance model has been introduced, emphasizing synergies among stakeholders, their inclusion in decision-making, and the circular influence across the multilevel and multistakeholder policy-making environment. Therefore, macro-regions are considered as social constructs that operate in soft spaces that have not been defined by fixed territorial boundaries, but emerge through negotiated commitments and cooperative arrangements among participating states and regions. In that context, territorial cooperations that has been built between countries and actors from different levels constitute the core mechanism of macro-regions through linking actors, institutions, and resources across borders.
Cooperation within the macro-regions is also shaped by historical, political, social, and economic contexts, which makes geopolitical dynamics and their cross-influence inevitable. Climate change impacts, energy insecurities, migration influxes, uneven development, and regional conflicts intensify the need for collaboration between the actors while also adding new layers of complexity. With rising geopolitical challenges worldwide, including military conflicts, institutional transformations, and persistent regional inequalities, territorial governance and cooperation mechanisms become more important in addressing these challenges. In this context, given persistent political tensions and socio-economic asymmetries, combined with the highly diverse tapestry of historical backgrounds and governance traditions, the Mediterranean Macro-Region requires particular attention. Having a better understanding of how EU-induced cooperation operates in overseas areas and how geopolitical crises shape their trajectories can help to be prepared for potential crises and have less impact.
Even though there is an extensive body of research on cooperation mechanisms, their potentialities and challenges in the intra-EU area, research on the external borders has a limited number of studies. To address this gap, the research will look at territorial cooperations in different spatial levels and the synergies with each other in the Mediterranean Macro Region. To have a better understanding of how territorial cooperation between EU and non-EU countries has been formed, the focus will be given to the cooperations between EU members, candidate countries and Southern neighbors. Namely, the cooperations that have been built for (i) Interreg Italy-Tunisia, (ii) Interreg South Adriatic, (iii) Interreg EU-members cooperation(will be decided later) and (iv) Interreg Next-Med will constitute the scope of the analysis. Afterwards, the research will focus on the synergies between these cooperations that operate on different geographical levels, and their synergy with the Mediterranean Macro Regional Strategies.
Considering planning as a practice addressing complexities and decreasing uncertainties to reduce and avoid risks as much as possible, the research aims to understand how geopolitical dynamics influence structural and spatial configurations of macro-regional governance through overlapping cooperation networks. This research will offer insights into the adaptive capacity of territorial cooperation and the future of the external dimensions of the EU’s governance and policies.
The Research Questions for this dissertation can be listed as follows:
RQ1 – How do territorial cooperations contribute to the governance of the Mediterranean Macro-Region under changing geopolitical conditions?
The subquestions that aim to address the hypothesis by looking at both the existing and Eastern and Western Mediterranean Macro-regions are:
SQ1 – How have territorial cooperation frameworks within EU-member states, candidate countries, and southern neighbors evolved within the Mediterranean Macro-Region?
*SQ2 – How have recent geopolitical dynamics influenced the governance structures of the cooperations, and their reactions to the crisis?
SQ3 – What synergies emerge among Interreg Italy-Tunisia, Interreg South Adriotic, Interreg EU-EU Members cooperations, Interreg Next-Med and the Mediterranean MRS frameworks?*
Conceptual or theoretical framework
Mediterranean MR was proposed in the early 2010s by the European Union, aiming to build a common Mediterranean identity and community in the Region. Long-standing divisions in the region, such as North-South, developed-underdeveloped, authoritarian-democratic, Christian-Islam, and so on, sometimes lead to challenges, conflicts, and instabilities. In order to overcome these challenges, building territorial cooperation has been considered a way to address these complexities while still supporting development.
However, given the rising number of crisis, building and maintaining cooperations also becoming challenging. While in the old geopolitics, the crises were mostly related to military conflicts and the outbreak of hot and cold wars; today, with the rise of new geopolitics, the meaning, as well as the concern, of the crises changes. As society reaches the knowledge-technical, political, social, economic, and ecological limits, new crises happen. Reaching political limits brings internal and external conflicts; social limits pave the way for social movements and protests; economic limits cause economic crises and rise/fall of particular sectors; ecological limits lead to extreme climate change impacts and depletion of land resources.
Aiming to address them and have less negative impacts, new governmental practices have been developed, and MRS and their way of working is one example. With having Three-No principle, which means no-new funding, no new frameworks, and no new institutions, MRS are is one of the collaborative way of territorial governance. Territorial cooperations in Europe have become a crucial tool for promoting territorial cohesion, enhancing social and economic integration, and facilitating Europeanization. Initiatives such as INTERREG programs have established platforms for knowledge exchange, policy coordination, and cooperative problem-solving across multiple levels of governance. In the scope of this research, there will be a particular focus on 4 cooperation projects that have been built under the scheme of Interreg:
(i) Interreg Italy-Tunisia Cooperation
(ii) Interreg South Adriatic Cooperation
(iii) Interreg EU-EU Member States Cooperation (will be defines later)
(iv) Interreg NEXT Mediterranean Cooperation
With having these four case studies, the aim of the research is to present a comprehensive overview of the ways cooperations interact with each other, with looking at collaborations across borders with EU member states, candidate states, and Southern neighbours. Looking at these strategies and synergies (i) within each other, (ii) with Mediterranean MRS, and lastly, (iii) their reactions to geopolitical changes might help to build an understanding to tackle future geopolitical changes.
Methods
The research has a three-fold methodology that combines the theoretical and practical parts of territorial governance and planning studies.
Firstly, a historical institutionalist approach will be applied to understand the historical, social, and political dynamics in the regions. Considering the complicated history in the Mediterranean Region, the methodology will be employed by following a categorization of crises and a typology of policy frameworks to have a better understanding.
Following the HI analysis, institutional mapping will be applied, benefiting from the previous steps' results concerning power dynamics in the region. Through that, the territorial governance scheme in the region that has been shaped by the main actors, their cooperation, and coalitions will be demonstrated. In that phase of the research, Actor-Network Theory will be used to provide a broader perspective on the stakeholders and power balances.
After explaining history and identifying actors, their networks for collaboration, and the power dynamics within the region, the synergies between the cooperations will be evaluated. This part will focus on how these cooperations interact with each other and with the Mediterranean MRS, and how they have evolved over time in response to the geopolitical changes happening in the region.
Through that methodology, the aim is to understand the geopolitical dynamics in the region, how it affects the actors, and how that has shaped the spatial configuration of the cooperation in the region.
Results or expected results
The main outcomes that are expected to be achieved at the end of this research are:
i. Providing a comprehensive understanding of Euro-Mediterranean relations, and how the cooperations within the Mediterranean Macro Region has been built,
ii. Presenting the actors, the relationship between the actors, and the power dynamics within the region, coupled with the role of cooperation in this wider scheme,
iii. Presenting these relations visually through mapping practices to elaborate their spatial dimension,
iv. Understanding how geopolitical crises affected the cooperation between countries, and how they have responded or adapted to them,
v. Understanding the influence of Macro-Regional Strategies in the Mediterranean Macro-Region and the cooperations.
Discussion and conclusion
Macro-regional strategies initially started as an experimental government practice; however, they became more complex over time as the world started to experience more challenges. While at the beginning the concern was building a free trade zone and environmental protection in the Mediterranean Region, it first moved to ensuring security by building a community after the terrorist attacks all over the world on early 2000s; then, after the Arab Spring in 2011, the aim of cooperations gained a new layer with migration governance. Meanwhile, on the other hand, the approach to the cooperations changed from having a community to having partnerships due to the broken trust on both sides. Lastly, after the global pandemic, with rising political, economic, and environmental crises, coupled with continuing wars, the aim of cooperation shifted again to having energy cooperation and maintaining security as much as possible.
Cooperative approaches are indeed important to decrease the impacts of the crisis: While foreseen crises have been addressed better through cooperative approaches by taking precautions in advance, unexpected crises and immediate responses to them have brought bigger issues in some cases.
In the end, it can be said that complex problems require complex solutions – and to do so, there is a need for cooperative transitional efforts to address multiple crises. Cooperations prepare the ground for broader discussions about the risks and threats; therefore, they also help countries foresee and get ready for the crisis. Rather than an immediate reaction to the crisis, getting prepared for it decreases the impacts of the crisis. Another evidence the history showed that is cooperations and its responses to change evolve through challenges. As seen, with the dynamic changes over time, cooperations’ concern and power dynamics change. Overall, that can be said that geopolitical dynamics’ effect on cooperations increase day by day on the governance.
References
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Canitano, G., & Capasso, S. (2026). Mediterranean Economies 2025: The Mediterranean as a Laboratory of Geoeconomics and Global Transformations.
Cavatorta, F. (2018). Historical/geopolitical turning points in the modern Mediterranean: Cold War, post-Cold War and Arab Spring 1. In Routledge handbook of Mediterranean politics (pp. 24-36). Routledge.
Dühr, S., Stead, D., & Zonneveld, W. (2007). The Europeanization of spatial planning through territorial cooperation. Planning, Practice & Research, 22(3), 291-307.
Faludi, A. (2013). Territorial cohesion, territorialism, territoriality, and soft planning: a critical review. Environment and Planning A, 45(6), 1302-1317.
Gänzle, S., Stead, D., Sielker, F., & Chilla, T. (2019). Macro-regional strategies, cohesion policy and regional cooperation in the European Union: Towards a research agenda. Political Studies Review, 17(2), 161-174.