Cross Border Governance In The European Union

This book discusses and evaluates the problems of governance within the European Union's cross border regions from diversity of perspectives and over a range of selected case studies.

The "deepening and widening" of the EU has thrown its changing internal and external borders into sharp relief. This work demonstrates that borders are key spaces within which issues such as identity, memory and trust, and communication between states continue to be played out and transformed.

This policy analysis examines geopolitical and sociocultural bordering practices in Europe's cross-border regions and their impact on civil society participation and governance in state peripheries. The normative hope of democratisation and the legitimisation of European politics in European Union border regions are connected with a greater degree of cross-border citizen engagement in Euroregional institutions and politics. Using the example of the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation, this study analyses and compares four cross-border Euroregional case studies: Tyrol-South Tyrol-Trentino, Galicia-North Portugal, SaarMoselle and the planned German-Polish TransOderana EGTC.

This study of the EU aims to demonstrate that a nascent transnational society and supranational institutions have played decisive roles in constructing the EU.

Border regions in Central Europe undergo tremendous changes due to the enlargement of the European Union and the related processes of Europeanization, bordering and re-bordering. The book explores the consequences of these processes for cross-border governance and spatial planning in Central Europe. It combines analyses of European and national framework conditions with case studies from border regions and cities in 8 countries. The focus is on generic questions of cross-border planning and cooperation as well as on selected sectors such as nature conservation, transport and economic development. The book is written for the international scientific community and for practitioners in the fields of spatial planning, cross-border cooperation, environmental protection and structural policy.

European integration has profoundly changed the relationship between national and subnational governments and has led to the emergence of the Europe of the Regions. This edited volume highlights some of the problems involved in the integration of the three main levels of governance in the European Union: the regional, national, and supranational level. The contributors address recent developments in various regions and examine the way these regions have adjusted to the growing importance of the European Union's multilevel governance system. Among the issues discussed are the emergence and institutionalization of new regional political systems, such as those of Scotland, Wales, and Flanders; the channels available to the regions for influencing the EU policy process in relation to their constituencies; and horizontal projects of integration among regions, which make the whole multilevel governance system more flexible as well as more complex.

This book looks both backward and forward with regard to the European Union’s political strategies towards its neighbouring countries. By bringing together the perspectives of critical geopolitics, policy studies and border studies, it presents a comprehensive review of the European Neighbourhood Policy and how it impacts the ongoing construction of the EU’s external frontiers. Is the EU committed to promoting integration in a ‘wider’ European space, or is a “fortress Europe” emerging where the strengthening of internal cohesion is coupled with the militarisation of its external borders? The book aims to problematize this question by showing how the EU’s external policies are based on a mixture of openness and closure, inclusion and exclusion, cooperation and securitisation. The European Neighbourhood Policy is a controversial strategy where regionalization and bordering, homogenisations and differentiations, centrifugal and centripetal forces proceed side-by-side, in an explicit attempt to construct a selective, mobile and fragmented border. A specific focus is devoted to the diversity of geo-strategies the EU is pursuing in its neighbouring countries and regions, macro-regional strategies and cross-border cooperation initiatives as new scales of cooperation, and the role of other global players.

In North America and Europe, cross-border governance arrangements have provided formal and informal frameworks to support cross-border cooperation. Analysing how these frameworks have emerged, the ways in which they have become institutionalized, and the processes by which they change is fundamental. Moreover, these frameworks are increasingly challenged by border securitization, thus limiting or jeopardizing decades of cross-border cooperative governance and coordinated public policies. Agents and Structures in Cross-Border Governance offers a series of case studies that explore these complex dynamics. To understand a range of cross-border governance frameworks, this collection addresses such topics as infrastructure development and management, resource sharing, regional politics, economics, security, human rights, the environment, culture, and community. The book explains how cross-border governance schemes have sought to mitigate some of the negative consequences of border security policies, allowing readers to discern how concrete national power struggles between federal/national and subnational governments unfold in border areas. In a world increasingly impacted by climate change and more recently the COVID-19 pandemic, Agents and Structures in Cross-Border Governance sheds light on the ongoing complexity of cross-border governance and offers lessons to help mitigate these challenges.