Building Resilience Through Cross-Border Cooperation Romania, Moldova, and Ukraine. A Comparative Analysis Between Euroregions “Upper Pruth” and “Lower Danube”

An assessment of economic and social potential of Euroregions “Upper Pruth” and “Lower Danube” reveals a wide spectrum of opportunities for cooperation, which would boost regional development and build resilience. However, there still exist several obstacles, which should be tackled in order to reach the desired goals. The aim of this article is to identify the opportunities and the obstacles that reduce the efficiency of cross border cooperation initiatives between Romania, Moldova and Ukraine. The passivity of Moldavian side could be explain by several factors, such as the inefficiency of administrative - territorial structures in creating and promoting own projects, lack of strategies and plans for regional integration which would exploit the benefits of CBC, insufficient allocation of money on a local level, as well as corruption. Within this paper, the concept of resilience will be used to assess and to identify the risks and vulnerabilities of both Euroregions and their impact on cross border cooperation. The research method is non-participatory observation. In addition, we use quantitative variables to assess and to compare the economic potential of both Euroregions. The conclusions of our study is that institutions and administrative management play a major role in cross border cooperation, and their lack of efficiency will lead to rather weak outcomes and less resilience. In addition, there is a tendency towards ignoring cross-border cooperation when discussing about building resilience within EU’s neighbourhood, therefore our study aims at filling this gap.