Transnational governance

Transnational governance, within a European Union framework, is both a subset of governance in general and an application of it to situations outside its usual limits of corporate or governmental hierarchies, whether regional or national. When such disparate hierarchies within the EU find common goals, typically within a conterminous geographic area, they seek to achieve them by integrating their various policies and activities. The goals of transnational governance, especially for areas previously divided by the Iron Curtain or pre-EU barriers to free trade and movement of peoples, is to foster economic and social development.

The economic development could be defined as the increased of wealth of a country or a region and the social development could be loosely defined as the improvements of quality of living for the population. Economic and social are, or at least should be, inseparable concepts. Why reach a high economic development if the inhabitants living in the area don’t see any benefits of that improvement?

Reach social and economic developments are already a challenging but it’s even more challenging in a transnational area such as the greater region. Some projects were created in order to foster these developments. The operational program Interreg IV A, “grande region” has for main objectives to make the greater region more attractive, encourage innovation, improve the numbers of high quality jobs, etc.

The improvement of the economic and social situation could be analysed through the example of the Vienna-Bratislava-Györ triangle which is a cross border area including three countries (Slovakia, Austria and Hungary) that were once part of the same empire. Good governance could lead to the adoption of a common identity which could lead to mutual support between people, companies or authorities sharing this common identity. Concretely, we observe a high amount of Foreign direct investments (FDI) coming from Austria in order to develop the general situation of Slokia and Hungary. This is very well descriptor in this citation of Tatzberger (2007) : “Foreign direct investments (FDI) play an important role in restructuring and improving the competitiveness of industry and manufacturing by helping to raise productivity and to expand exports. It has been one of the driving forces behind industrial restructuring in Hungary and Slovakia”.

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Wikipedia