Both planning practice and research increasingly acknowledge the existence of new scales and governance arrangements alongside and between statutory planning systems. Examples of new scales of non-statutory planning are large-scale megaregions and macro-regions. Drawing on examples from North America and Europe (Southern California and the Danube Region respectively), this article examines how new processes of cooperation at this scale can influence other statutory levels of decision-making on spatial development. The analysis of spatial delineations, discourses, actors, rules and resources associated with megaregions and macro-regions suggests that this type of ‘soft planning’ can foster territorial integration when a perception exists that there are joint gains to be made, when informal rules are negotiated in context-specific and bottom-up processes, when soft spaces are used as arenas of deliberation to renegotiate shared agendas, and when actors succeed in ensuring the anchorage of informal cooperation in other arenas.

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Ongoing processes of European integration and cooperation have come alongside a growing importance of spatially relevant policies and the development of numerous cooperation initiatives at the EU level. These influence the territorial development of Europe considerably. We claim that the key to understanding the nature of today’s EU spatial governance is the interdependence of the diversity of policies and initiatives and their embeddedness in the multi-level governance systems. Against this background, the chapter aims to analyse contemporary processes of scaling and rescaling in EU spatial governance resulting from EU territorial politics and territorial cooperation initiatives. We introduce a four-dimensional framework to analyse scalar construction and policy development, and take stock of policies and funds that shape EU spatial governance. We conclude that the nature of EU spatial governance can best be understood when viewing these various EU initiatives and territorially relevant politics as interrelated.

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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.

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Chapter 6 offers a state-of-the-art review of research on political order formation at the macro-regional level in the European Union. The chapter brings together different strands of literature, in particular from political science, spatial planning and geography. Drawing on previous examples of sub-regional cooperation, such as for instance Baltic Sea regional cooperation, EU macro-regional strategies have recently been introduced as a new instrument in the EU’s territorial cooperation and cohesion policy repertoire. To date, four macro-regional strategies have been developed (Baltic Sea Region, 2009, Danube Region, 2011, Adriatic-Ionian Region, 2014 and the Alpine Region, 2015). By establishing comprehensive frameworks for cross-sectoral policy coordination (e.g. transport infrastructure and environmental protection) and hence proposing a new form of territorially bound common political order, these strategies aim to encourage EU member/partner countries in macro-regional territories to contribute to active territorial cooperation. Macro-regions have generated scholarly interest across a number of disciplines, including geography, regional and spatial planning, political science and public administration. The emergence of macro-regional strategies has led to new questions and academic debates on issues such as their impacts on existing practices of territorial cooperation and whether they challenge or complement previously established formats of (sub-)regional cooperation. Drawing on a review of existing literature, this contribution seeks to take stock of existing research on the subject, discuss the conceptual starting points, and chart possible directions for future research. The chapter concludes that the conceptual debates in political and spatial sciences exhibit a number of overlaps that might be fruitfully explored in the future.@en

The launch of the first EU macro-regional strategy in the Baltic Sea Region in 2009 marked the start of a number of similar initiatives across Europe. According to various commentators in the planning and geography disciplines, the new macro-regional strategies signal the redefinition of regional policy rationales, new scales of policy intervention, new actor constellations and variable geometries of governance (see e.g. Allmendinger et al., 2014; Antola, 2009; Bialiasiewicz et al., 2013; Faludi, 2012; Stead, 2011). In short, they argue that the appearance of these new strategies has created new policy arenas which exist either between or alongside formal institutions and which arise from cooperation across various spatial scales, and involve different policy sectors and actor constellations.@en