Cross-Border Cooperation as a Territorial/Relational Approach to Regional Development?

Border regions have been at the forefront in the last decades in the experimentation of new transnational approaches which differ from traditional regional policies. The idea is that to “address common challenges”, regions need to transcend nationally-based administrative systems and increase cooperation and synergies across political boundaries. In the domain of regional development such a trans-regional perspective breaks a long tradition of policies strongly focused on the regional and the local scale. In this frame, the article offers a comparative assessment of the main distinctive dimension of cross-border cooperation initiatives, vis-à-vis traditional regional development policies and the “place-based approach”. By focusing on a set of recent initiatives launched in Sicily (Italy), the aim is to compare place-based strategies and cross-border cooperation in light of recent debates about territorial vs. relational perspective on regions and spatial politics. Through the identification of transnational spatial units, joint management authorities and trans-regional strategies - it is argued - cross-border policies may be regarded as a paradigmatic example of a relational approach to regional development based on a new ethic of place-to-place relations and regional openness. As such, our analysis shows that cross-border initiatives help to overcome some of the limitations of place-based strategies - namely, the risk of policy capture, territorial introversion and communitarian confinement. - while incurring in others - institutional isomorphism, technocratic management and democratic deficit. On the other hand, cross-border cooperation resumes a strong territorial understanding of places and regions, albeit in the form of “crossborder” or “unbounded” regionalism. In that, there is a strong risk that those initiatives translate into bordering exercises, rather than the opposite.