Tourism and cross-border regional development: insights in European contexts

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to structurally analyse the role of tourism in regional development processes in European cross-border regions with different historical development paths. Departing from an institutional perspective, the research is based on comparison of the position of tourism in region-building processes in the newly developing German–Czech cross-border region and the more ‘mature’ German–Belgian borderlands. Results indicate that the development of local cross-border tourism projects is no guarantee for positive destination-wide regional development impacts. In some cases, these projects may even reinforce asymmetrical socio-economic development directions of neighbouring borderlands. Rather, the socio-spatially equitable distribution of tourism benefits in cross-border contexts depends on several process-based aspects. These include the presence of ‘thick’ (cross-border) institutional arrangements, multi-scalar representation of tourism stakeholders in decision-making processes and a transversal position of tourism in regional development strategies. However, both with cross-border institutional ‘under-mobilization’ (Germany–Czech Republic) and with institutional ‘over-mobilization’ (Germany–Belgium), the informal network position of institutional brokers proved key for safeguarding the integrative character of tourism in the inevitably complex cross-border region-building process.

KEYWORDS:

• Cross-border cooperation
• regional development
• border regions
• tourism governance
• integrative rural tourism
• institutional thickness

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank the stakeholders in Germany, the Czech Republic and Belgium who addressed them for this research. The authors are indebted to Bright Adiyia and Egbert van der Zee for their valuable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 The German word ‘Standort’ literally means location. However, as a political–economic concept it has a more value-laden connotation and is therefore freely translated as ‘territorial development’. See Brenner (2000) for more detail.

2 The Eupen district, the High Fens and the Sankt Vith district combined with the municipalities of Malmédy and Waimes, which are also located in the Walloon Region of Belgium but outside of the Belgian German-speaking Community.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Foundation – Flanders (Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek).