Macroregional strategies are instruments for place-based territorial development, recognizing that EU policies have territorial impacts requiring integrated solutions across policy domains and regions. Currently, there are four macroregional strategies covering the Baltic Sea (EUSBR), the Alps (EUSALP), the regions around the Danube River (EUSDR), and the Ionian Adriatic Seas (EUSAIR). The aspiration is that a transnational approach, involving regions with common territorial challenges, can yield more impactful solutions than those from individual regions.

Given their emphasis on transnational collaboration, macroregional strategies are part of the discussion on how to reform the EU's Cohesion policy beyond 2027. However, the implementation of macroregional strategies is far from easy, as they depart from established ways of policymaking by introducing more fluid and open processes of implementation with no new committed funds, structures, or legislation. Since no set outputs are prescribed to achieve macroregional strategies, traditional strategic management techniques focused on performance and output indicators are only partially adequate to understand how macroregional strategies are performing.

This paper takes stock of these specifics and asks how the fluid character of macroregional strategies affects their implementation at the individual (practitioner) and meso levels of macroregional strategies. Based on a constructivist approach and qualitative interviews with Slovenian stakeholders in the EUSDR, EUSALP, and EUSAIR, the article explores how individual practitioners (and groups of practitioners in the same organizations) engage in and make sense of macroregional strategies. The results are analysed against the background of collaborative governance theory, taking into account variables describing institutional support and the collaborative process among the implementers. Through a comparative analysis of the interviews, the article shows how individual practitioners' sense-making and understandings affect the aggregate implementation of macroregional strategies. Implications for practice and theory are derived.

In 2022, the European Commission drafted the European Economic Governance Review. Political agreement on the reform was reached at the end of 2023. The whole reform is built on commitments linked to the green and digital transformation and aims to set a path towards sustainable public finances and accountability to meet the EU's ambitions.
One regulation is intended to strengthen the coordination and monitoring of economic policies (in the framework of prevention), while the second draft regulation is intended to bring some dynamism to the excessive deficit procedure (correction). The Directive complements the budgetary frameworks of the Member States to be in line with the Regulations. The main objective of the restructuring of the economic governance framework is to ensure robust and sustainable public finances, while promoting sustainable and inclusive growth and job creation in all Member States through strategic reforms and investment.
In this article, we analyse the new EU Economic Review and seek to highlight potential obstacles and challenges to its implementation. We focus on the debate on whether and to what extent reform can help to stabilise public finances and particularly how political ownership of long-term reforms in member states can be ensured.

After thirty years of the Maastricht Treaty, it makes sense to look back and assess Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). Times have changed since then. EMU experienced three significant crises: the Eurozone crisis, the pandemic crisis, and the inflationary burst following the invasion of Ukraine. Since crises provide a template for change, I ask whether EMU embraced a reform agenda consistent with the challenges triggered by these crises. Significant strands of the literature emphasised the flaws of the European monetary union at the outset. Indeed, some inertia based on the rigidities of EMU caused by the prevailing political-economic model, its constitutional background and relevant political actors’ resistance to change explain, to a large extent, how EMU’s capacity to address the Eurozone crisis was hampered. Yet, there is evidence that the learning effects of the Eurozone crisis helped political actors to quickly adapt to the pandemic crisis. Nevertheless, the reaction to the recent inflation burst (notably the by the European Central Bank) seems to bring back well know rigidities to EMU governance. With this background in mind, I will engage on a comparison of the current governance of EMU with the original model to ascertain whether EMU was prone to change and what were the determinants that explain change.