Cross-Border Aspects of Sustainable Development in the Adriatic Region
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Cross-Border Aspects of Sustainable Development in the Adriatic Region Milan Bufon
Published online: 15 February 2013 Ó EMUNI 2013
Abstract In the Adriatic region one could find several contradictory tendencies, as a result of local accommodation of social structures and systems to the political organization of space. The persistent planning and spatial divergence prevents the region from achieving the same potential common development visions, bringing forward that area as a special ‘development region’ within the EU. The discussed case shows the need for a more appropriate governance of different horizontal (spatial and sectorial) as well as vertical (hierarchical) policies in planning crossborder cooperation or social and spatial (re)integration of borderlands and population, especially if we try to create a more sustainable and ‘‘long-lasting’’ development plan for our increasingly globalized and co-dependent ‘‘common home’’ on the European and Mediterranean level. Keywords Sustainable development Adriatic region Cross-border cooperation EU regulations Regional cooperation
Introduction The problems related to sustainable development planning in Europe are connected to the problem of cross-border, i.e. inter-state and inter-regional cooperation and adopting joint developmental programmes within the framework of a supra-state system such as the EU. In this area, the EU has adopted many initiatives, which would bring more harmonised forms of social and spatial planning in the European region. On the local level, the Interreg programme has been evolving for a longer period of time, and now includes all ‘‘internal’’ and ‘‘external’’ borderlands of the M. Bufon (&) Head, Institute for Geographical Studies, University of Primorska, Garibaldijeva 1, 6000 Koper, Slovenia e-mail: [email protected]
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EU Member States. For the purpose of improving the coordination of cross-border initiatives and projects, the European Commission in 2004 proposed the establishment of permanent cooperation bodies that would on the one hand enable a more structured implementation of Article 159 of the Treaty of the European Community regarding internal economic and social cohesion, including the redistribution of a part of the EU budget to its less developed regions, and on the other hand introduce a new legal order in the European practice, which would take the ‘‘governance’’ of cross-border regions and the so-called ‘‘Euroregions’’ out of the exclusive jurisdiction of national sovereignty and thus enable them to communicate closer and more directly with the European development authorities in Brussels (Scott 2006). Due to this ‘‘dual’’ character, the initiative faces all problems, typical of the contradictory search for balance between convergence and divergence that constantly follows the process of the European integration. Consequently, we face many different interpretations of the function and nature of ‘‘Euroregions’’: under this term, some understand only a combination of two or several borderlands th
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