Cross-border region

A cross-border region is a territorial entity that is made of several local or regional authorities that are co-located yet belong to different nation states.

In Europe, there are a large number of cross-border regions. Some of them are often referred to as 'Euroregions' although this is an imprecise concept that is used for a number of different arrangements. European cross-border regions are most commonly constituted through co-operation among border municipalities, districts or regions.

Many cross-border regions receive financial support from the European Commission via its Interreg programme. They vary in their legal and administrative set-up but have in common that they are not 'regions' in an administrative-constitutional sense. Many cross-border regions are based on some sort of civil-law agreements among the participating authorities. For instance, the classical form of a Euroregion is the ‘twin association’: On each side of the border, municipalities and districts form an association according to a legal form suitable within their own national legal systems. In a second step, the associations then join each other on the basis of a civil-law cross-border agreement to establish the cross-border entity. Many Euroregions along the Germany-Benelux border are established according to this model, following the initiatives by the EUREGIO.

The first European cross-border region, the EUREGIO, was established in 1958 on the Dutch-German border, in the area of Enschede (NL) and Gronau (DE). Since then, Euroregions and other forms of cross-border co-operation have developed throughout Europe.

For local and regional authorities, engaging in cross-border regions meant they entered a field long reserved for central state actors. For dealing with issues such as local cross-cross-border spatial planning or transport policy, in the 1960s and 1970s various bi-lateral and multi-lateral governmental commissions were established without granting access to local authorities (Aykaç 1994). They dealt with issues such as local cross-border spatial planning and transport policy.

But over the last thirty years the scope for non-central governments (NCGs) to co-operate across borders has widened considerably. To a large degree, this can be related to macro-regional integration in Europe. In particular, two supranational bodies, the Council of Europe and the European Union, were important for improving the conditions under which NCGs could co-operate across borders. Whereas the Council of Europe was in past particularly active in improving the legal situation, the Commission of the European Union new provides substantial financial support for CBC initiatives.

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Wikipedia