ABSTRACT
The generic concept of ‘transboundary cooperation’ refers to forms of cooperation across national borders between cities, regions, national governments and other agencies or organisations at various geographical scales to pursue policy objectives and projects in fields as varied as transport, cultural and economic cooperation, environmental management, and so on. Since 1999 the term trans-European cooperation refers specifically to the three strands of cooperation programmes (cross-border, transnational and interregional) funded by EU Cohesion Policy, also known as INTERREG (introduced in Chapter 16). Since the INTERREG Community Initiative was created in 1990 to support cross-border cooperation, the financial support for trans-European cooperation has steadily expanded. In particular there has been a significant growth in cooperation on spatial development issues and spatial planning across national borders under the transnational strand of the INTERREG programmes (IIC, later IIIB and IVB), which now involve networks of thousands of professionals (Dühr and Nadin 2007). Additionally, there have been increasing flows and exchanges of knowledge within transnational expert networks of urban or regional professionals (De Jong and Edelenbos 2007), and through numerous networks such as Eurocities (see Chapter 10). As a result, many local and regional authorities across the EU are now routinely involved in some forms of cooperation across national borders and have become increasingly exposed to planning practices from other countries through international networks (Dühr and Nadin 2007).
