Implementing Ecological Development Concepts in Border Regions Project Experiences and Conclusions Drawn

Abstract

Due attention was given to transnational cooperation at the EU’s eastern border virtually from the moment the process of political reformation began in Europe (cf. Selke 1994, von Malchus 1994, Roch 1995, Moll 1994). Regional planners were notable in discerning the need for action as well as opportunities to proceed in a targeted and orderly manner with the objectives of ecologically sound development in the border regions in the process of being constituted. Building on the experiences of transnational cooperation in the Alps and in the Franco-German and Dutch-German border regions, where there have been exemplary successes at municipal level, preference was given in the case of cooperation at the external border of the EU to the elaboration of transnational development concepts of an interdisciplinary nature with regional planning at the helm. With the mutual consent of the neighbouring countries and before fully-fledged regional development plans had been put in place in the Czech Republic, Poland, or the resuscitated German states of Saxony or Thuringia, transnational regional planning strategies were fashioned, first between Bavaria and what was then still Czechoslovakia and a little later for the Saxon-Czech and the entire German-Polish border area, that constituted common goal programmes and orientation mechanisms for development at national and regional level as well as for the municipalities with their divergent outlooks, powers to act, and degrees of motivation as regards transnational cooperation.