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Cross-border Governance: Inventing Regions in a Trans-national Multi-level Polity

From an esoteric subject of international relations and voluntarism-based initiatives, cross-border governance has turned in the last decade into a key expression of regionalism and of dynamics of change of territorial relations in Europe. Overcoming and blurring borders lies at the core of discourses on European integration aimed at erasing tariff and non-tariff barriers from the geography of European trade. Meanwhile, exchange across borders is becoming the generative matrix and the potential carrier of new concepts of development, such as the construction of new “economic integration zones.” Promoting the emergence and institutionalisation of cross-border regions has thus become an important objective of European Union cohesion policy. Yet the more borders are crossed—for instance, through the process of eastern EU enlargement—the more they are reproduced along other dimensions: linguistic, cultural, symbolic, as well as along differentials in abilities and power. Accordingly, the meanings and facets of borders are changing, posing new challenges to spatial disciplines and policies. This article presents a review of issues concerning cross-border regionalism and planning debated in geography and regional studies, with an emphasis on the challenges entailed by the socially constructed and “invented” character of cross-border regions and by the institutionalisation of cross-border governance.