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This article is concerned with the role of national governments in the rescaling of cross-border metropolitan governance structures in Europe. In the context of emergent cross-border metropolitan regions, the objective is to highlight the structuring effects of support policies to metropolitan areas at national level, in the context of their politics of scales, on the scalar configurations developed by local and regional actors. Using a comparative approach, the cases of Basel, Geneva and Luxembourg are singled out. The confrontation between German, Swiss and French state policies, and the modalities of the rescaling of levels of governance within the three cross-border metropolitan regions, allows us to underline the considerable influence of national guidelines on scalar reconfigurations. The structuring role of governments in this ‘new cross-border regionalism’ needs to be relativized, however, in functions of the specific characteristics of each context as well as factors relating to the actors involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides evidence of how national borders affect the structure of policy networks. Our analysis of the Basel cross-border metropolitan region located across Switzerland, France and Germany considers the case of public transportation in border regions. Using a social network analysis of the relationships between 44 actors, we show that national borders play a diminishing role in the formation of policy networks for both information exchange and decision making. Local actors develop different brokerage roles according to their country of origin: Swiss actors function as coordinator and representative brokers vis-à-vis actors located in France and Germany. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we question the integration processes in three small cross-border metropolitan areas: Luxembourg, Basel, and Geneva. By referring to an original analysis framework, we evaluate the nature and intensity of the functional and institutional integration and highlight the elements that structure the cooperation between the actors. The analysis shows that there is not necessarily a reciprocal link between the size of the functional area and the extent of the cooperation. Whilst no metropolitan-sized organisation is on the agenda in Luxembourg, the example of Basel and Geneva shows that the presence of a national border offers an opportunity to invent original forms of governance, to increase the autonomy of the local authorities by different types of cooperation which transcend the institutional and territorial divides, and to promote the international character of the metropolitan centre. In a context of global competition, these features represent an undeniable benefit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]