The challenge of governance in crossborder territories: potentialities and loopholes of a recent European tool, the European grouping for territorial cooperation (EGTC)

Governance has since long been a real challenge for the European Union (COM (2001) 428 final) White Paper on European Governance). With the inclusion of territorial cohesion in the EU Treaty (Lisbon Treaty, 2009), territorial governance was also acknowledged as a major issue at stake (Barca report on Cohesion policy reform, 2009; CoR 89/2009fin, White Paper on multilevel governance). Territorial governance can be understood in two ways: governance of territories (how is a territory organised) and/or territorial dimension of governance (referring to wider understanding of governance, and how this larger perspective integrates the territorial dimension – or not)(ESPON 2006, report 2 3 2 on territorial governance). Both includes at least two aspects: a)the legal, institutional and juridical framework in which it takes places, b) the governance organisation based on more informal grounds. In this paper we want to investigate those different paths, with a focus on the new European juridical tool to organise territorial cooperation: the European grouping for territorial cooperation (EC1082/2006), and in particular which potential this instrument provides for a better governance on the EU territory. Elaborating further on our work for TERCO report (ESPON 2013) we will first concentrate – through desk research - on the current implementation of European grouping for territorial cooperation, which illustrate a large range of governance arrangements: in this case, we analyse at a certain moment how cooperation operates in different contexts in all EU, mainly on crossborder territories(current EGTCs settled are in large majority crossborder cooperation). In a second step, we will investigate more in depth – using the result of long interviews with major relevant stakeholders from the area - the governance of the French/Belgium border territory, from the North sea until the Lille- Kortrijk-Tournai (LIKOTO) Eurometropole . The cooperation in this area – which is now organised through two EGTCS, has a long history, and is extremely interesting to analyse as it shows an evolution both in time, in scale, in objectives, in partners involved and in governance arrangements: in this case, we follow one area of cooperation along a time scale of three decades. From this analysis, we will then provide some territorial governance ‘toolbox’, having in mind that ‘one size does not fit all’ (Barca, id), and that our hypothesis is that there is no universal – neither European - ‘best model’ of governance.