Focusing on Cross-Border Territorial Impacts

Abstract

This chapter discusses the advantages of making use of Territorial Impact Assessment procedures on European Territorial Cooperation Programmes. In more detail, it underlines the advantages of Territorial Impact Assessment as a novel Project/Programme/Policy evaluation tool, when compared with other existing policy evaluation techniques, and discusses how it can be applied to assess European Territorial Cooperation Programmes. Additionally, it presents a concrete case study of applying a Territorial Impact Assessment tool (TARGET_TIA) in assessing the main territorial impacts of a European cross-border cooperation sub-programme: Inner Scandinavia from the Swedish-Norwegian INTERREG-A Programme. This chapter then proposes several main policy dimensions to be used when assessing territorial impacts of the three different types of European Territorial Cooperation Programmes: cross-border cooperation, transnational cooperation and interregional cooperation. Finally, it presents some advice, following the author’s previous experience, on how to produce relevant, and as rapidly as possible, territorial impact assessment studies, namely for evaluating European Territorial Cooperation Programmes.