Colodetti HELENA , European Commission - DG REGIO - Border Focal Point, Belgium
Ferreira RICARDO, European Commission - DG REGIO - Border Focal Point, Belgium
Cross-border regions are territories where individuals are prevented from exploiting the full potential of their activities. This happens frequently due to the incompatible legal frameworks applicable on one and the other side. Such inconsistencies in the pertinent law and administrative practice hamper socioeconomic agents daily, causing a border effect, or loss of socio-economic potential. Evidence shows that, even in the European Union with its Single Market, these border obstacles have a major impact on the development of territories.
Tackling those barriers, the European Commission has launched the b-solutions initiative. It allows assessing cases, one by one, pointing to individualized and contextualized solutions. Since 2018, 90 cases have already been assessed with a deep legal analysis being made by an independent expert for each one.
The present paper looks at those ninety cases, classifying them according to the root causes of each obstacle, and to the solution proposed. Results show that although European law - and its transposition - is a significant source of obstacles, the majority of them are enrooted in national law. Accordingly, the solutions identified by the experts are frequently centred in binational agreements or in amendments of national legislation.
These results allow for two reflections: i) the first is the confirmation of the need for a mechanism, based on European law, to solve cross border legal obstacles; ii) the second is the necessity to develop, from a long term perspective, the capacity to look at cross border territories horizontally instead of the sum of two parts in a classic hierarchical administrative division of territories European-national-regional-local. This would imply the ability to develop legal frameworks applicable to a given cross-border territory even though it straddles over two different countries.
Mots clés : cross-border|territory|b-solutions|cross-border obstacles|border region
A104806RF