THE LABORATORY DIMENSION IN CROSS-BORDER DEVELOPMENT: INSIGHTS FROM THE CZECH-GERMAN BORDER REGION

Europe's internal border regions are often referred to as the 'laboratories of European integration'. There are still many barriers along these borders that can potentially be overcome through successful cross-border cooperation. We address the laboratory dimension of cross-border cooperation in a two-stage Delphi survey with experts from the Czech-German border region. First, our results show that certain laboratory functions are essential for the Czech-German border region. Problem-oriented testing in everyday life and learning from best practice examples of other border regions seem to be a key for cross-border development. Second, ’classical’ cooperation topics such as people-to-people projects or tourism work quite well. In contrast, the ‘big’ issues, such as transport or health services, seem to be rather challenging. Third, we see that formal cross-border sectoral planning or further cross-border regional harmonization could intensify the cross-border development. Our results are based on the project "Cohesion in border regions" (CoBo) which is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research.