RegioGro role
National expert for Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo
Developed under the ESPON 2030 Cooperation Programme, NoStaGeo examined how European, national and regional policy can respond to non-standard functional geographies: territories shaped by environmental, economic, infrastructure and social relationships that do not correspond neatly to administrative borders or conventional Functional Urban Areas.
The project addressed a key challenge for EU Cohesion Policy, regional development and place-based policymaking: how to organise effective territorial governance when issues such as water systems, ecological networks, energy use and industrial transformation operate across municipalities, regions and national borders.
Following an initial exploration of nine emerging geographies, the research focused on four priority areas: freshwater supply in metropolitan regions, ecological connectivity, energy-saving strategies, and brown-to-green industrial transition. Governance frameworks were compared across 41 institutional contexts, creating a pan-European evidence base on multi-level coordination, functional areas and cross-boundary governance.
RegioGro served as national expert for Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo, preparing four national governance assessments within the wider ESPON comparative research.
For each territory, RegioGro analysed governance arrangements across all four project themes, examining the relevant institutional, regulatory and policy frameworks; distribution of responsibilities across governance levels; stakeholder coordination; cross-sector integration; adaptability; and use of place-based and bottom-up approaches.
The work also identified good practices, governance gaps and implementation constraints. These national assessments formed part of the project’s core empirical evidence for comparing territorial governance across Europe and brought detailed Western Balkans expertise into the wider ESPON analysis. The country-report methodology explicitly assessed six dimensions of territorial governance and fed into comparative visualisations and governance typologies.
The project produced the ESPON NoStaGeo Final Report, 41 national governance assessments, thematic and territorial case studies, policy recommendations, strategic maps and interactive tools including ESRI StoryMaps, thematic infographics and the European Territorial Governance Dashboard. The dashboard enables users to compare governance arrangements across Europe for the four principal thematic areas.
Period:
from 2023
to 2025
Geography:
from Pan-European research covering 41 institutional contexts, with national governance assessments for Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Kosovo.
