European perspective

Policy oriented paper 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 cooperation form could not be such successful as many European and regional actors hoped it.

It formulates three hypotheses concerning the biases undermining mostly the success of this community legal tool. Firstly (1), 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 EGTCs’ establishment and functioning. Secondly (2), that albeit EGTC could be used as Multi-Level Governance platform for managing cross-border cooperation or other policy programs, this possibility is in most of the cases practically not utilised. And thirdly (3), 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.