Granting Austrian citizenship to German-speaking Italians would not be a victory for South Tyrol's separatists

Austria's new government has proposed to offer Austrian citizenship to German-speakers in the province of South Tyrol in Italy. Stephen J. Larin and Alice Engl argue that although the proposal has been welcomed by separatist parties in South Tyrol, it does not threaten Italy's territorial integrity, and it would not have happened without the close relationship between the Austrian ÖVP and the autonomist-but-not-separatist South Tyrolean People’s Party (SVP)

Future Perspectives on Territorial Cooperation in Europe: The EC Regulation on a European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation and the Planned Council of Europe Third Protocol to the Madrid Outline Convention concerning Euroregional Co–operation Groupings. EDAP 3/2007

The aim of this paper is to describe, analyze and compare the recent legal developments regarding territorial cooperation that can be observed on the international and supranational level in Europe: the EC Regulation on a European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation adopted in 2006, on the one hand, and the planned Third Protocol to the European Outline Convention on Transfrontier Co–operation between Territorial Communities and Authorities concerning Euroregional Co–operation Groupings of the Council of Europe, on the other hand. Which future perspectives for territorial cooperation in Europe do these two new tools open and what could be the added value of having two (rather similar) instruments? These are just two of the questions standing behind this paper, entitled “Future Perspectives for Territorial Cooperation in Europe”, which–towards its end–will eventually come back to one of the most crucial determinants for the future development of territorial cooperation in Europe, i.e. the attitude of the national states towards CBC and their respective constitutional provisions

Agenda-setting dynamics in the post-2020 cohesion policy reform: the pathway towards the European cross-border mechanism as possible policy change

Cross-border areas in Europe are promoted as places of integration, whose cooperation is encouraged by the Interreg programme and the European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation (EGTC) tool. For the 2021–2027 Cohesion Pack, the European Commission proposed the European Cross-Border Mechanism (ECBM), a regulation that would allow one member state to apply the law of a neighbouring member state to facilitate cross-border projects. This mechanism represents a paradigm shift, empowering border areas to manage their own integration (functional-horizontal) and institutionalise a policy pathway for resolving border-specific legal or administrative obstacles (institutional-vertical). This paper analyses the dynamics behind the ECBM proposal according to the multiple streams framework (MSF), revealing policy and politics streams’ elements to explain agenda setting in EU policy processes. Methodologically, we apply a document analysis with qualitative content and cross-case analysis elements, and a combined strategy of deductive-inductive codes. This analysis is complemented and validated by expert interviews

A case study for a psychographic-behavioral segmentation approach for targeted demand generation in voluntary medical male circumcision

Public health programs are starting to recognize the need to move beyond a one-size-fits-all approach in demand generation, and instead tailor interventions to the heterogeneity underlying human decision making. Currently, however, there is a lack of methods to enable such targeting. We describe a novel hybrid behavioral-psychographic segmentation approach to segment stakeholders on potential barriers to a target behavior. We then apply the method in a case study of demand generation for voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) among 15–29 year-old males in Zambia and Zimbabwe. Canonical correlations and hierarchical clustering techniques were applied on representative samples of men in each country who were differentiated by their underlying reasons for their propensity to get circumcised. We characterized six distinct segments of men in Zimbabwe, and seven segments in Zambia, according to their needs, perceptions, attitudes and behaviors towards VMMC, thus highlighting distinct reasons for a failure to engage in the desired behavior