Encapsulating the Significance of the EGTC for Territorial Cooperation: A literature review and tentative research agenda

Within less than a decade, the European Grouping for territorial cooperation (EGTC) has become a landmark in the EU regional policy. By the end of 2015, sixty EGTCs were established while 16 were in the pipelines. Although non-obligatory, it is conceived as a crucial tool in the implementation of the EU regional policy, in particular to manage European territorial cooperation programmes. The EGTC is a genuinely multifaceted instrument raising crucial research questions for European and border studies. It is first and foremost a legal instrument resulting from the EU legal order developing new standards for cross-border cooperation. In making it possible to involve local, regional and national authorities to manage territorial cooperation initiatives, it scrambles policy networks and gives a new operationalisation to the concept of multi-level governance. Crossing perspectives, disciplines, methods of analyses and research questions is crucial to grasp the multifaceted dimensions of this tool and its significance for European territorial cooperation. This article undertakes a literature review of the existing body of literature with the intention to outline the main characteristics of the existing EGTCs. This helps outlining possible avenues for a future research agenda.