Cross-Border Policies and Spatial and Social Integration: Between Challenges and Problems

Abstract

<jats:p>The article is discussing both challenges and problems that emerge from an intensified cross-border integration, particularly in Europe, which is creating a sort of ‘cross-border regionalism’ that might be sought as a new constituent part of a complex, multi-level system of governance incorporating not only national, but also local/regional agents. Cross-border regionalism is thus not only a system of government, but also a system of ‘grass-rooted’ social and spatial (re)integration of borderlands. This process is closely related to the question of changing territoriality, preserving on the one hand the regional control and on the other hand re-acting societal and territorial co-dependence.</jats:p>

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“…With respect to the elaboration of cross-border strategies for spatial development, academic papers have been written on the phases of strategic elaborations (Durand, 2014), and on their limits (Jacobs, 2014), but, to our knowledge, few have been designed around the concrete impacts of cross-border cooperation projects on the dynamics of urban development. For Bufon (2011), cross-border territorial strategies can be summarised as non-constraining documents that are limited to a high degree of generalisation, due, for de Vries (2008), to the fact that there is no clear and recognised hierarchy within cross-border governance. Spatial planning is not a supra-national competence and the action of the European Union is limited to the definition of nonbinding strategies, such as the European Spatial Development Perspective (ESDP) (1999), the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion (2008), and the Territorial Agenda 2020 (2011).…”

Building a cross-border territorial strategy between four countries: wishful thinking?

“…Crossborder territorial strategies have to be understood as non-binding documents which describe the desired patterns of future spatial development that have been commonly defined at the cross-border scale. Most of the times, these non-constraining documents are limited to a high degree of generalization (Bufon, 2011) and, according to Jacobs (2014, p. 86), 'The more strategic the approach will be, attempting to look at crossborder space in a more integrated way, the less will it be possible to embed this in the right contexts'. Indeed, since spatial planning is a purely national competence, the difficulty is to produce a strategy which is shared on both sides of a border and which can be translated into concrete actions while remaining compatible with the legal frames in place in the different countries.…”

Cross-Border Aspects of Sustainable Development in the Adriatic Region

“…Due to this ''dual'' character, the initiative faces all problems, typical of the contradictory search for balance between convergence and divergence that constantly follows the process of the European integration. Consequently, we face many different interpretations of the function and nature of ''Euroregions'': under this term, some understand only a combination of two or several borderlands that are instrumentally connected only by the wish to receive European subsidies from the Interreg programme; others believe that these are institutional bodies that have to establish certain joint bodies for joint management of their development programmes; another opinion is that ''Euroregions'' are not only co-dependant areas in socio-economic terms, but that they are also socio-culturally linked by a joint regional affiliation (Bufon 2011a). The article will present some issues related to the difficult implementation of an integrated cross-border development vision in Europe, based on the case of the Adriatic region.…”