EURegionsWeek – MOT Workshop “No country is an island: joint cross-border strategies for a successful energy transition”
Neither climate nor energy respects borders. Yet public policies are implemented within national frameworks that differ from one country to another. Cross-border territories, as laboratories of European integration, are places where these divergences meet and where new opportunities for cooperation emerge.
As a cross-cutting issue, the energy transition can be usefully addressed in cross-border contexts. It involves sustainably developing a shared territory, collectively addressing the same challenges, and managing shared natural resources, using the cross-border living area as the relevant scale. This makes it possible to network or pool infrastructure, exchange best practices, coordinate actions taken, and carry out joint initiatives.
In practice, energy transition strategies do not concern only energy production, but also transport, territorial development, the management of natural spaces, and risk management. By presenting a series of initiatives across European land and maritime borders, this workshop aims to better recognize the potential for cross-border cooperation in this field.
Etudes de cas présentées
Four case studies illustrated the main lessons learned and explained how obstacles were overcome at the local level:
- The renewable marine energy (RME) sector in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine–Euskadi–Navarre Euroregion offers an opportunity to study the conditions for a win-win strategy in this field, from the Euroregional level to the European level.
- The Strasbourg-Ortenau Eurodistrict, as a testing ground for participatory and citizen-based approaches to renewable energy and climate adaptation.
- The Union of Municipalities of Harju County (Estonia), which is leading a series of projects for a low-carbon transition in the Gulf of Finland, particularly in the area of cross-border sustainable mobility in the strait between Tallinn and Helsinki.
- The Haut-Rhin Department: innovation and energy transition are the two priorities of the local post-Fessenheim strategy, which also aims to strengthen cross-border synergies with German municipalities.
