Border Futures - Results

Building on the discussions of the working group "Border Futures", the volume "Border Futures - Zukunft Grenze - Avenir Frontière. Future viability of cross-border cooperation" emerged.

The findings aim to be applied to the border areas in the territory of the Regional Working Group of Baden Wuerttemberg and also to contribute to a broader expert discourse on the further development of cross-border cooperation.

The questions of sustainable cross-border governance, new spatial functionalities and new planning instruments play just as much a role as the opportunities offered by the current programming period of the EU structural policy for the border areas. Empirical findings show that the motivation of the actors has a major influence on the success of cross-border cooperation.

Furthermore, it is shown that there are fields of action in which cooperation stagnates, which suggests the need to strengthen governance in border regions. Spatial planning in national sub-regions is organised by border regions in very different ways - not only normative planning principles play a role here, but also value attitudes, paradigms and planning cultures. Along nation-state borders, it can be shown on the one hand that borders "blur" to a certain extent, since in many places border crossings are part of everyday life, while on the other hand these borders have linguistic and/or administrative barriers that can also be deepened by values and norms.

As a result, border regions can be decisive for the emergence of new spatial planning strategies and even new instruments of spatial development - either in a national or cross-border context.