Negotiating border regions: Retail development in Luxembourg and the Greater Region

Cross-border regions in the European Union represent an extraordinary governance environment. Located peripherally at the interface of national planning systems and their various administrative levels, they contain multiple spatial dimensions of decision-making that don’t always match across borders. Domestic regulations often lack cross-border considerations. Similarly, coordinated international approaches to regulate cross-border development are rarely in place. This legal limbo together with weak enforcement and intentional undermining of existing regulations has led to the perpetuation of highly complex and merely non-transparent decision-making processes. In such a context, spatially relevant projects are frequently subject to international bargaining and informal power struggles that bear high potential for conflicts and hegemonies as recent developments such as the localization of large-scale retail businesses along the Luxembourgish border illustrate. This paper argues that institutionalized planning processes are frequently accompanied or even replaced by new and informal actor relationships where actors capitalize on cross-border inequalities and inconsistencies. Drawing on examples of retail development in the Greater Region it proposes an extended understanding of ‘governance’ that goes beyond integrating multiple spatial scales and acknowledging growing interdependences between government and non-government actors to incorporate multiple actors, informal interactions and new power relationships in border regions.