Euro Regions as Policy Providers in the European Arena: Actors, Processes and Outcomes

It is commonly assumed that the rise of the European integration has given way to new forms of governing within member states. One of the expressions of this governance shift is the rise of new territories across the borders of the European Union through the constitution of Euroregions. Euroregions (also labelled Euregions or Euregios) are a form of cross-border co-operation between representative authorities of contiguous regions of two or more states which recently converted into new transnational actors of the European Union. This paper analyses the institutional performance of such organisations by examining their policy production. By doing so, it also focuses on the determinants of Euroregional public policies through the statistical exploitation of a database taking into account the influence of time, number of partners, territorial autonomy, legal status, institutional leadership and regional GDP. This study raises two main conclusions: firstly, Euroregions can be described as “weak policy providers”; secondly, only institutional leadership seems to exert a significant influence on Euroregional policy outputs.