The Enlightenment of EU Cross-Border Cooperation Research on the Collaborative Governance in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area

Abstract

Economic globalization and regional integration are the core motivations of regional cooperation in the 21st century, and the issue of cross-border cooperation has attracted much academic attention. As the largest regional integration organization with the highest level in the world, EU takes the lead in practicing regional integration in the process of economic globalization. Europe's cross-border governance has been paid attention in a long time in economic geography and political geography, and a large number of theoretical and empirical research results have been achieved on issues such as border cooperation model and cross-border governance mechanism. The development experience of EU provides rich theoretical and practical experience for the collaborative governance in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, as the two also involve the collaboration across institutional boundaries and power restructuring. Therefore, the analysis of EU cross-border cooperation is of great significance to promote Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao coordination. Based on the bibliometric analysis of Citespace, this paper systematically studies the research trends of EU cross-border cooperation from 1993 to 2020. The study finds that: 1) EU cross-border cooperation research mainly focuses on border regional interaction, cross-border cooperation mode, cross-border cooperation field, cross-border cooperation barriers and other issues. The regional integration of Europe has promoted the transformation of border areas from marginal areas to the forefront of development, and gradually formed a cross-border governance model under the superposition of formal institutional arrangements and informal institutional arrangements. The field of cooperation involves economic cooperation, tourism, environmental governance, health and other fields. 2) The development of EU cross-border cooperation benefits from the political interaction and mutual trust between countries, formal and informal institutional coordination, and the expansion and deepening of the scope of cooperation. However, there are still deficiencies in bilateral differences, cross-border accessibility, immigration and security. 3) As the same cross-institutional border region, the practical experience of EU cross-border cooperation has important enlightenment for the collaborative governance in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Value identity is the basis of cross-institutional cooperation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area. Inclusive and orderly institutional arrangements are conducive to reducing the shielding effect of cooperation boundaries. And the combination of multi-scale cooperation and multi-dimensional governance system will effectively improve the cooperation in border areas.

Keywords

• eu
• boundary
• border adjacent area
• guangdong-hong kong-macao greater bay area
• collaboration