Borderlands of Governance : Municipal Perspectives on Cooperation in the Saarland-Moselle Region

Recognizing European cross-border cooperation as a complex multilevel governance shaped by both bottom-up and top-down processes, and viewing recent border-regional strategies as a catalyst for decentralizing cross-border relations in French-German border regions, this book examines municipal actors’ perspectives in the “Greater Region”, specifically the département Moselle and the German Saarland. Bridging governance and border studies by adopting a lens of “borderlands of governance”, it studies the contributions of intermunicipal cross-border governance to processes of bordering and “place-making” and to systems of multilevel cross-border governance. (In)formal intermunicipal cross-border networks – whose relevance and ingenuity became particularly evident during the Covid-19 pandemic – play a crucial role for the functioning of the borderspaces, in some instances evolving into “quasi-territorial” governance reflecting communities beyond national borders yet remaining bound to logics of territoriality and sovereignty. Here, the conceptualisation of “borderlands of governance” offers a framework for understanding them as contingent elements of multilevel cross-border governance.