The potential to foster governance learning in the Baltic Sea Region: Network governance of the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region

The Baltic Sea ecosystem is displaying symptoms of extreme stress from multiple sources. These complex and “wicked” problems require cooperation by actors for multidisciplinary pooling of knowledge to completely understand the problem and adaptively learn in order to develop appropriate policy strategies. Inherent in the design of the European Union Strategy for the Baltic Sea Region (EUSBSR) is the promise to foster cooperation by key BSR network governance actors, connecting them to develop joint policy arrangements needed for governing the challenges of the Baltic Sea. The EUSBSR is the key knowledge broker in the region and has the capacity to augment BSR network governance of the Baltic Sea. Despite the importance of knowledge transmission and policy learning to the EUSBSR, there has been no formal study of it in the literature. This paper aims to make a theoretical contribution to the literature by evaluating the latent potential of the EUSBSR to foster policy learning across BSR governance networks. It does this through document analysis focussing on the interaction platforms of the EUSBSR that interconnects BSR governance networks across policy sectors.