Territorial impact assessment and cross-border cooperation

Abstract

Impact Assessment procedures have gained increasing attention from the European Commission (EC), as fundamental tools in providing evidence of the potential impacts of European Union (EU) financed projects/programmes/policies. Yet, only recently, the Territorial Impact Assessment (TIA) of EU directives and Policies have gained a broader support from the EC, as a result of pivotal contributions from several ESPON projects in producing adequate TIA techniques/tools/methods (TEQUILA, Quick Check, EATIA). In the meantime, these tools are being perfected, alongside others (like the TARGET_TIA), in order to provide a more efficient and broader analysis of the evaluated project/programme/policy territorial impacts. Furthermore, there is a general agreement that TIA needs to take on account the different territorial levels (EU, national, regional, local), and should be applied in specific sector policies/programmes, which require more holistic evaluation procedures, as they have a strong territorial dimension. This is clear in the case of the Cross-Border Cooperation (CBC) programmes, due to their large scope of interventions on providing territorial development of the border areas, which in the EU encompass more that 60% of its territory. In light of this, this article proposes an adaptation of the TARGET_TIA technique to assess the territorial impacts of the CBC programmes, by focusing on the evaluation of the components of the CBC programmes specific goals: barrier effect reduction and territorial capital valorisation.