Critical Analysis of the EGTC Regulation: Will the European Border Regions have an effective MLG-platform for territorial cooperation?
Critical Analysis of the EGTC Regulation: Will the European Border Regions have an effective MLG-platform for territorial cooperation?

Author(s): Dániel Hegedűs
Subject(s): Geopolitics
Published by: Kossuth Kiadó Zt.
Summary/Abstract: The european grouping of territorial cooperation (EGTC), established by the community Regulation 1082/2006/ec, is the first comprehensive, intentionally uniform legal platform for territorial cooperation in the european union. during the last years a couple of deep analyses were born about this legal institution, mainly with descriptive, but fortunately sometime with analytical and critical character. This is not really an academic, but rather a more policy oriented paper and would like to analyse and present the community and hungarian experiences gathered with the implementation of EGTC Regulation during the past years. it would like to identify the most important biases, which caused that this form of cooperation could not be as successful as many european and regional actors hoped for. it confronts these experiences with the main points of the EGTC supervision process, led by the european commission in 2011 and with the previous modification of the hungarian and Bulgarian national provisions. The paper formulates three hypotheses concerning the biases undermining mostly the success of this community legal tool. Firstly, that the existing incompatibilities among the national implementation provisions and the diverse implementation of the regulation by the competent national authorities create non-neglectable obstacles for the EGTC’s establishment and functioning. secondly, that albeit the EGTC could be used as a multi-level governance (mlg) platform for managing cross-border cooperation or other policy programs, this possibility is in most of the cases practically not utilised. and thirdly, the amendments of national provisions often target the creation of state authorities’ stronger control on EGTC activities, and not the supporting of a more effective functioning.

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