Policy Entrepreneurship and Multilevel Governance: A Comparative Study of European Cross-Border Regions

Abstract

Introduction Virtually all European borders areas are involved in some type of cross-border region (CBR). Today, there are more than seventy such arrangements in Europe, usually operating under names such as`Euroregions' or`Working Communities'. Although CBRs have a long tradition in postwar Western Europe (O'Dowd, 2003), the 1990s saw a large increase in their numbers all over Europe. Among the various models, Euroregions have certainly received most recent attention in policy practice, mostly because they fit the organisational and spatial requirements of the EU support programme for CBRs. As opposed to the larger, multiregional Working Communities that often spread over several countries, Euroregions are small-scale groupings of contiguous public authorities across one or more nation-state borders and can be referred to as`micro-CBRs' (Perkmann, 2003). Are Euroregions a new type of region, spanning national borders and creating cross-border territories? As such, they would insert themselves into the wider tendencies of`rescaling' and`reterritorialisation' theorised by various observers (Blatter, 2001; Brenner, 1999; Jessop, 2002). However, others have emphasised the patchy track record of European CBRsöin terms of institution-building as well as their actual impact on local cross-border environments (

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