Governance – Power– Cooperation

Abstract: This thematic focus deals with issues geared towards governance processes and inequality ratios. A distinction is made between three fields of investigation: governance processes in the institutional cross-border cooperation, processes of self-governance in everyday life and a power-critical perspective as general research perspective in the analysis of bordering processes. The fields of investigation focus on institutional and individual research contexts in the Greater Region and other border areas and assist in identifying the challenges and opportunities posed by cross-border cooperation, in understanding the everyday logic of bordering, and in discovering logic behind the inclusion and exclusion.

The thematic focus “Governance – Power – Cooperation” deals both diachronically and synchronically with issues geared towards governance processes and inequality ratios at different levels and from different disciplinary angles. Systemization allows the distinction between three approaches, relating to institutional and individual research contexts in cross-border territorial and non-territorial contexts in the Greater Region and other border regions.

The examination of institutional governance processes is intended to allow more profound insight into the challenges of the institutional cross-border cooperation and identify the chances thereof. To this end, the Greater Region – with over 40 years of experience in cross-border cooperation – offers an appropriate and diverse research context. Here as in other border regions, already existing findings (e.g. in the spatial planning field) may be expanded, as may other sectoral cross-border cooperations (e.g. in the fields of employment, higher education, culture) which may also be developed from the governance point of view. The studies cover issues of organization and/or administration cultures including the typical educational paths of the players involved as well as legal and administrative structures.

In addition, processes of self-governance are examined, which express themselves individually in self-positioning practices vis-à-vis socially normative attributions (Governmentality (Foucault)). The meshing of normative attributions on the one hand and individual self-positioning on the other hand is reflected in everyday appropriations, which are the focal point as interstices, i.e. from the point of view of deviations and creative reinterpretations. The analyses of such interstices as dynamic appropriations provides insights on the everyday logic of bordering, e.g. in connection with spatial and gender identity or self-optimization processes.

The thematic focus also comprises an issue, which has asserted itself as a general research perspective in analyzing bordering processes: the political question concerning the existing balances of power or the establishment of hegemonies, which create border demarcations and/or naturalize differences for the purposes of legitimization.

Such a power-critical perspective reveals inclusion/exclusion logics as well as the negotiation of dominance relationships in a variety of social and spatial study sites. To this end, historical observations offer appropriate starting points, as do current bordering phenomena, such as those heightened on the European political stage for example, or articulated in cross-border cooperation networks.