ABSTRACT
The North Sea Commission (NSC) has a membership of 29 regional authorities as of February 1995. The countries represented are United Kingdom, Denmark, Sweden, Germany, and Norway and observers from the Netherlands. The NSC is governed by a General Assembly consisting of representatives from all member regions. The representatives are members of the popularly elected councils of their respective regions. All the regions bordering the North Sea have either development plans or economic development strategies. The General Assembly convenes annually to decide policy, within the context of the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR), and to plan future work. Regional economic strategies throughout the North Sea zone share a number of similarities. Hordaland County’s encounter with the NSC is a good illustration of the challenges and opportunities that internationalisation may entail for a regional authority that had not been very active in this respect before the 1990s.
