Village Renewal Without Borders: Czech-Austrian Cross-Border Cooperation in Rural Development as a Response to Shared Regional Challenges

This paper examines how the interconnected environment and rural traditions of South Moravia and Lower Austria facilitated cross-border cooperation during the 1980s and 1990s, focusing particularly on village renewal programs. Despite the physical transformations of the socialist era, the formerly entangled regions retained their inherent similarities and faced similar challenges, such as peripheral position, demographic changes, and loss of attachment to the locale due to population change and modernization processes. The paper argues that their interconnected environment served as a linking platform that enabled a common response to these challenges. The case study of village renewal programs demonstrates how Lower Austrian expertise found fertile ground in South Moravia and subsequently became a source of inspiration at the central level. However, the paper also shows the decline in cross-border cooperation in the late 1990s, partly due to the shift of rural policy coordination from regional settings to the European level.