Paper Titles & Abstracts

The starting point of this paper is the empirical observation that local governments located close to a national border in Europe increasingly tend to form or join organizations with local governments located on the other side of the border, and that the number of such organizations has risen sharply over the past two decades. In the paper these are referred to as Euroregions, and the purpose of the paper is to answer the question why local governments join and maintain membership in these organizations. While there is an increasing body of literature on Euroregions, contributions tend to focus on regional rather than local membership, and single-case studies have been more common than comparative approaches. The paper therefore brings micro-level comparative empirical data to argue against the European Union portrayal of Euroregions as primarily responding to local or regional policy problems that cannot be dealt within the national contexts, referred to as 'filling the gaps' (European Commission Regional Policy, website 2012). Instead, the paper argues that the local government engagement mainly derives from normative beliefs, and when instrumental expectations appear, they are grant-driven rather than policy-driven. The empirical data consists of material generated by 136 interviews with mayors of local governments in six Euroregions, located at three national borders (Sweden/Norway, Hungary/Slovakia and Austria/Germany). Qualitative, relational and statistical data from these interviews are used to investigate assumptions, beliefs and practices underpinning Euroregional membership.