Cross-Border Territorial Impact Assessment

Abstract

The solution for cross-territorial impact assessment (CBC TIA) developed by the Central European Service for Cross-Border Initiatives (CESCI) can be classified as a bottom-up model – unlike the TIA tool of the European Union (cf: EC, Assessing territorial impacts: operational guidance on how to assess regional and local impacts within the Commission Impact Assessment System, European Commission, Brussels, SWD(2013) 3 final, 2013) and those designed in the framework of the ESPON programme (like ESPON EATIA, INTERCO. Indicators of territorial cohesion. (Draft) Final Report. Part B Report, 2013) and similarly to the TARGET TIA by Medeiros (Territorial Impact Assessment (TIA). Concept, Methods and Techniques, Centro de Estudos Geograficos da Universidade de Lisboa (CEG) – Instituto de Geografia e Ordenamento do Territorio (IGOT). Lisbon University, Lisbon, Reg Stud Reg Sci 2(1):97–115) and the TIA of the ITEM (since 2016, annually), which are gained from daily experiences of cross-border cooperation. The CESCI CBC TIA focuses on processes facilitating the gradual elimination of the border effects and the shared exploitation of the territorial potential, territorial capital of the divided border area. These processes can be detected by a multidimensional toolkit including the mapping of the perceptions of Otherness and the territorial behaviour of the border people, and the analysis of the forms and embeddedness of cross-border governance. Consequently, this model does not contain a universal formula, but rather, it establishes a set of quantitative and qualitative indicators describing how, and to what extent, the assessed activities, projects and investments contribute to an eased permeability of the administrative borders.