The opportunities of EU’s Danube Regions Strategy for Romania and Bulgaria

Macro-regional strategies are one of the recent EU initiatives with the main objective as the territorial cohesion and increasing the degree of coordination between different levels of governance of the key actors and stakeholders. The fundamentals of macro-regional strategies have been put together by acknowledging the importance of cohesion basins as factors that may increase economic growth. The transnational cooperation has become a connecting vector from national and regional perspectives; the programs currently having as main priority the flexible approach to the functional links between European regions belonging or not to the EU. The main challenge is to ensure the long-term performance of the programs and the identification of new instruments for valorizing results and creating value added by providing the strategic framework for the actions of different actors and stakeholders and by implementing coordination policies and ensuring specific funding sources. Our paper aims to point out the opportunities offered to Romania and Bulgaria by the EU’s Danube Regions Strategy.