Opportunities and Challenges for the Greater Bay Area: Lessons from the European Cross-border Cooperation Experience

Abstract: The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area initiative represents an ambitious effort to promote integration across the Pearl River Delta. The initiative aims to position GBA as one of the world’s leading economic nodes by promoting economic and other linkages across the region. Against this backdrop, it is interesting to consider what lessons regional integration efforts in other multi-jurisdictional settings might hold for the GBA. European Union efforts to promote transboundary cooperation can be particularly instructive in this regard. In some places those efforts have given rise to innovative entrepreneurship clusters, promoted economically productive linkages across formerly fractured space, and encouraged new ways of thinking about space and place. At the same time, ambitions for greater transboundary cooperation in Europe have often been frustrated by poor communication, rivalries among different actors, power imbalances across borders, competition from other cross-border initiatives, and a failure to address issues beyond the economic sphere—environmental, social, and cultural). The successes and shortcomings of the European experience with transboundary cooperation are suggestive of factors that are likely affecting, and will continue to affect, plans for a more integrated Pearl River Delta region.

About the Speaker:

Alexander Murphy is Professor Emeritus of Geography at the University of Oregon and, currently, a Visiting Research Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Hong Kong. He specializes in political, cultural, and environmental geography. He is the author of more than 100 research articles and book chapters, and several books, including most recently Geography: Why It Matters (Polity Press, 2018; translated into Chinese by Peking University Press). In 2014 he was elected to membership in the Academia Europaea.

Murphy is a Past President of the American Association of Geographers, and former Senior Vice President of the American Geographical Society. He co-edited the journal Progress in Human Geography for eleven years, and Eurasian Geography and Economics for eight years. In the early 2000s he chaired the U.S. National Academy of Sciences — National Research Council Committee charged with identifying “Strategic Directions for the Geographical Sciences.” In 2014 the American Association of Geographers bestowed on Murphy its Lifetime Achievement Award. He holds a bachelors degree in archaeology from Yale University, a law degree from the Columbia University School of Law, and a Ph.D. in geography from the University of Chicago.

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