Abstract
In the cooperation project ‘YOUMIG,’ funded by the INTERREG Danube transnational programme, challenges of youth migration were discussed in a transnational consortium consisting of project partners from different countries from Central and Eastern Europe experiencing difficulties such as a declining population and outmigration, as well as immigration of young people, which necessitated the provision of an integration infrastructure. Project outcomes included strategies as well as pilot activities performed by local-level authorities. The following article will consider outcomes as well as experiences from stakeholders involved in the project and investigate individual and organizational learning processes throughout the project. It will elaborate on the question of the extent to which transnational cooperation can potentially facilitate sustainable institutional changes and transformation. The results confirm the potential of transnational cooperation towards triggering learning and institutional change. Nevertheless, they underline that in the context of the project, the learning processes that could be achieved were predominantly of an individual nature and that the tangible outcomes could not lead to sustainable institutional changes.
Highlights
Returning to the overall question of the article, namely an enquiry into the degree to which transnational programmes such as INTERREG can trigger institutional change and organizational learning processes in the context of migration challenges, the following conclusion elaborates on the experiences gained during the INTERREG project YOUMIG
The project offered a great environment for mutual and transnational learning, with multiple possibilities towards exchanges between consortium partners as well as a variety of knowledge transfers and activities. These led to multiple individual learning processes, as indicated by the evaluation survey conducted at the end of the project
Not all of these learning instances eventually led to sustainable organizational learning— a variety of outputs on the local level was realised (e.g., Pilot Actions)—nor did they lead to sustainable institutional transformations of migration governance either
Summary
The following article will focus on this latter question and critically examine transnational learning activities and their potential of leading towards sustainable institutional transformations on the local level It wants to do so by drawing on results from an evaluation conducted at the end of the project. The article will reflect on the ways in which transnational cooperation can contribute to learning about youth migration and mobility, for towns and cities that display different migration profiles, including emigration It will further scrutinise how project outcomes and learning experiences may lead to sustainable institutional changes, so that challenges of youth migration may be addressed more effectively on the local level
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