Speaker
Description
Border regions often face particular challenges, especially with regard to governance structures, institutional framework conditions and interregional cooperation. These problems concern both international borders, as addressed in the context of EU initiatives such as INTERREG, and intra-national borders, for example between federal states. While national borders have long been addressed in research, the focus on intra-national borders has so far been less pronounced.
The so called “(economic) region of the centre” - located at the interfaces of the three federal states of Hesse, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia - illustrates the complexity of intra-national borders as social and institutional constructs. Due to the federal administrative structure in Germany, the federal state borders are of great importance for planning processes. It is obvious that formal planning processes are influenced by the federal state borders. However, non-formal planning processes - such as regional development processes - are also strongly influenced by the federal state borders, even though common problems exist in border areas along the federal state borders, which in principle should also be addressed together.
As part of the Strategic Regional Development Concept (SREK) in the cross-border region between Hesse, North Rhine-Westphalia and Lower Saxony, several analyses were carried out to examine the interactions between key players such as regional management, economic development agencies and chambers of industry and commerce. Based on qualitative interviews with economic and planning actors in the study area, social and semantic network analyses were conducted and statements were made about key topics and actors as well as their interactions within and across federal states.
The results show that interactions often end at administrative borders, while cross-border cooperation is hampered by institutional fragmentation and a lack of policy coordination. While the EU explicitly addresses national borders in the context of the INTERREG programme, in other EU programmes such as the LEADER initiative, intra-national borders already pose enormous challenges for the development and implementation of innovative governance models in (intra-national) border areas.
The presentation discusses the methodological approaches of network analysis with regard to their theoretical foundation and possible applications in regional science. The results of the analysis show the challenges for central key actors and their interactions in intra-national cross-border interactions. From a network perspective, the article shows how governance structures and political coordination in border regions are structured and challenged by federal state borders.
| Keywords | network analysis; regional development; border region; governance; LEADER |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | Yes |
