At the beginning of July, the Committee for Regional Development of the Saxon State Parliament held a hearing on cross-border cooperation between the two federal states. Prof. Dr. Robert Knippschild and Dr. Sebastian Heer from the Leibniz Institute of Ecological Urban and Regional Development (IOER) were invited for an expert statement and presented three conceivable scenarios to the parliamentarians. The policy paper published now deepens what has been presented, analyzes the current structural and political framework conditions and sets out fundamental requirements for effective cross-border coordination in questions of structural transformation in Lusatia. The paper takes up scenario thinking, established in scientific policy consulting, and elaborates three scenarios that can be regarded as options for intensified cooperation between Saxony and Brandenburg. In combination with precisely formulated functional premises, politics and administration are provided with an advisory service based on the IOER expertise of the BMBF project "Transformation Lusatia".
In light of practical suitability of the scenarios developed, it has been important for the scientists to design options that fit the actual conditions prevailing. More specifically, this means that only those combinations whose basic structures already exist are to be considered for in-depth cooperation. In order to avoid unfavourable arrangements, different political levels and functional logics are distinguished, and a 'technical', a 'regional-political' and a 'parliamentary' level of cooperation scenario is suggested. The researchers emphasize that the scenarios designed are not alternative, but rather complementary variants that can easily be combined and harmonize well with each other. This is due to the fact that the designed scenarios, with their different focuses on parliamentary, regional, and technical aspects are deliberately located at different levels of decision-making.