Multilevel Development of Cross-Border Territorial Organization: A Case Study of The Euroregion Baltic

The growing importance of integration in Europe poses new challenges for theoreticians and practitioners in improving the instruments of managing cross-border cooperation. One of the most popular tools for such cooperation is the Euroregion. It can be treated as a specific organization operating on the territory of at least two countries. The cross-border nature of this organization significantly determines its functioning. The Euroregion is a unique supranational organization operating at various cooperation levels. Organizational structures of national Euroregional units vary from country to country. This is due to the different legal and political systems in these countries.

The theoretical aim of the paper is to define the attributes of a cross-border territorial organization. The empirical goal is to identify the relations between stakeholders of the Euroregion Baltic and assess their impact in the achieving Euroregion’s goals. When conducting literature studies, it can be noticed that many scientific papers have been written on Euroregions and cross-border cooperation. Most of them concern cross-border areas covering 2 countries. This is due to the fact that Euroregions are effective tools for the development of primarily bilateral cross-border cooperation involving two neighbouring regions. There are few such Euroregions that include partners from as many as 5 countries. In the case of the Euroregion Baltic, there is an additional barrier to cooperation, which is the maritime area that divides some partners. Effective management of such a structure is quite a challenge. Therefore, the use of the concept of cross-border territorial organization seems to facilitate this task.

For the purposes of the article, literature review and empirical studies were carried out. Moreover, thanks to many years of cooperation with Euroregional authorities at the national and international level, the authors used the observation method, which provided additional information helpful in carrying out the research.