Macro-regional Strategies: Agents of Europeanization and Rescaling?

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.