A Policy Network Approach to Cross-Border Metropolitan Governance: The Cases of Vienna and Bratislava

This paper presents a structural analysis of the governance arrangements established between Vienna and Bratislava close to the Austrian-Slovak border. We unravel the metropolitan governance relationships built in the context of territorial debordering and critically assess the policy relevance of cross-border cooperation (CBC). We particularly focus on cross-border economic positioning as a policy domain of strategic importance in a neoliberal era marked by urban and regional entrepreneurialism. In order not to embed the analysis in a predefined territorial configuration or geographic scale, this paper argues for an approach based on policy networks. The key point is that those private and public actors involved in building cross-border regions are developing a diffuse form of governance that relies on a set of flexible and tangled connections that do not necessarily conform to the territorial boundaries of the states concerned. Based on original fieldwork and data on the exchange of information between the stakeholders involved in cross-border economic positioning, we use a social network analysis to describe the relational patterns of the policy network and complement the analysis with a qualitative assessment of actors' interests and strategies. The roles and positions of the actors reflect the sharp imbalances in interest and resources, highlighting the persistence of border-related barrier effects that hamper CBC initiatives between Vienna and Bratislava .