Filippo Celata

The post-political ecology of protected areas: Nature, social justice and political conflicts in the Galápagos Islands

The aim of this article is to reflect upon the motivations and the outcomes of the socio-political conflicts which attempted to challenge the rationality of conservation in the Galápagos Islands, in light of recent inquiries into the post-political condition. Protected areas, we argue, are paradigmatic examples of post-political spaces where universal moral imperatives and the overwhelming role of scientific knowledge reduce the possibility for disagreement, and make traditional political means useless. In order to sustain this argument, we discuss the idea of a post-political condition in relation to the debates about biodiversity, social justice and the political ecology of protected areas in the Global South. We will see how the alliance between conservation science, the State and the tourism industry strongly influenced the territorialisation of the Galápagos Islands and what the political implications are. Such alliances became the object of violent confrontations during the 1990s, which favoured the adoption of reforms inspired by the principles of sustainability and environmental governance. The idea of a post-political condition, in our opinion, can help to understand the outcome of these conflicts and, more generally, the difficulties in reconciling environmentalism with social justice in protected areas.

Place-based strategies or territorial cooperation? Regional development in transnational perspective in Italy

Italy has been at the forefront in the implementation of place-based regional development strategies during the 2000s, and it constitutes therefore a privileged point of view to investigate the contents of the approach, its potentialities as well as its limitations. In light of those limitations, several scholars have recently directed their attentions toward a typology of policies – territorial cooperation – which may be regarded as a trans-regional and transnational approach to regional development. In the paper, we offer a review of the main criticisms of place-based strategies and of the main distinctive dimensions and the potential value added of territorial cooperation initiatives, in light of recent debates about territorial vis-à-vis relational approaches to regional development. The identification of transnational spatial units, joint management authorities and trans-regional strategies, it is argued, may indeed help to overcome some of the limitations of place-based strategies – namely, the risk of policy capture, territorial introversion and communitarian confinement – while incurring in others – institutional isomorphism, technocratic management and democratic deficit. As the European political and economic space become increasingly trans-scalar and networked, the two policy domains may potentially learn from each other, and a new generation of local policies may emerge which are both territorial and relational, place-based and trans-regional.

Neighborhood Policy, Cross-border Cooperation and the Re-bordering of the Italy–Tunisia Frontier

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the contents and outcomes of the cross-border cooperation program between Italy and Tunisia in light of a review of the limits of the European Neighborhood Policy and of its impact on the construction of the EU external frontiers. The transfer of the CBC policy model to this and similar cases, it is argued, produces ambivalent results due to various asymmetries and the lack of a proper multi-level governance of trans-border relations. Some suggestions are proposed about how a renewed approach may increase the political relevance of the program, support the democratic transition in Tunisia and contribute to a rethinking of Euro-Mediterranean policies.

Borderscapes of external Europeanization in the Mediterranean neighbourhood

In this paper, we conceptualize external Europeanization as a multi-situated and selective process of differential inclusion. The aim is to contribute to recent research on the reconfiguration of “normative power Europe” through a more proper consideration of the dialogical positioning of different typologies of both recipients and transmitters of European external policies, and local economic actors, in particular. We show how the idea of the Mediterranean as a borderscape of differential inclusion allows for an analysis that extends beyond the restrictive inside/outside binary typical of many current interpretations of the Euro-Mediterranean and the European Neighbourhood Policy. This view is especially crucial in times of decreasing European Union leverage, internal crises and geopolitical turmoil in the Mediterranean and beyond. The attempt is, therefore, to shed light on the complicated geometries of Europeanization while also emphasizing the ways in which they entangle both symbolic projections and material interests. Such a conceptualization is then applied to a case study of the border between Italy and Tunisia.

Beyond Fortress ‘EU’rope? Bordering and Cross-Bordering Along the European External Frontiers

This introductory chapter gives an overview of debates about the contents and limits of the European Neighbourhood Policy, and of how the book intends to contribute to them. It focuses, in particular, on how the European Neighbourhood Policy impacts the ongoing construction of the European Union’s external frontiers, and introduces the wide variety of ways through which such re-bordering is pursued. The Neighbourhood Policy is the result of an attempt by European institutions to define the proper balance between openness and closure towards its neighbourhood, regionalization and bordering, cross-border cooperation and the securitization of the EU external borders, the idea of a “fortress Europe” on the one hand and the imaginary of a “wider Europe” with “concentric circles” of integration on the other. These bordering and cross-bordering processes, it is argued, are not contradictory but proceed side-by-side in an explicit attempt to construct a selective and fragmented border regime, and for the reconfiguration of ‘EU’rope as a post-Westphalian and normative global actor.

La cooperación transfronteriza en la región del Trifinio y la difusión de modelos europeos de gobernanza de las fronteras en América Latina

RESUMEN En la region del Trifinio se concentran algunas de las experiencias mas avanzadas de cooperacion transfronteriza de America Latina. Dichas experiencias son promovidas por las instituciones europeas y se han inspirado fuertemente en el modelo europeo de gobernanza de las regiones transfronterizas. Al mismo tiempo, este modelo no ha sido simplemente trasladado de la Union Europea a la America Latina, sino que tambien se ha adaptado a las condiciones del contexto y a las caracteristicas especificas de los procesos de reterritorializacion e integracion macrorregional que tienen lugar en la region y, mas * El conocimiento directo de los procesos de integracion transfronteriza centroamericana, y en particular el de la Region del Trifinio, ha sido posible gracias a las oportunidades ofrecidas por el Centro Studi di Politica Internazionale (CeSPI), de Roma, en el ambito de dos de sus iniciativas: el programa Fronteras Abiertas, realizado por dicha entidad en colaboracion con el Instituto Italo-Latino Americano y cofinanciado por la Cooperacion Italiana, y el proyecto Fomento de la Cohesion Social e Integracion Regional Territorial de los municipios fronterizos del Trifinio centroamericano, coordinado por la Mancomunidad Trinacional Fronteriza Rio Lempa y cofinanciado por el Programa URB-AL III de la Comision Europea.

Bordering imaginaries and the everyday construction of the Mediterranean neighbourhood: Introduction to the special section:

This special issue of European Urban and Regional Studies maps out a move from a strictly geopolitical to more socio-political and socio-cultural interpretations of the European Union’s (EU’s) ‘Mediterranean neighbourhood’. In doing this, the authors propose a dialogic understanding of neighbourhood as a set of ideas and imaginaries that reflect not only top-down geopolitical imaginaries but also everyday images, representations and imaginations. The introduction briefly summarizes conceptualizations of ‘neighbourhood’ provided by the individual contributions that connect the realm of high politics with that of communities and individuals who are affected by and negotiate the EU’s Mediterranean borders. Specifically, three cases of socio-spatial imaginaries that exemplify patterns of differential inclusion of the ‘non-EU’ will be explored. The cases involve Italy–Tunisia cross-border relations, the EU’s post-‘Arab Spring’ engagement with civil society actors and the case of Northern Cyprus. The authors suggest that ‘neighbourhood’ can be conceptualized as a borderscape of interaction and agency that is politically framed in very general terms but that in detail is composed of many interlinked relational spaces. The European neighbourhood emerges as a patchwork of relations, socio-cultural encounters, confrontation and contestation, rather than merely as a cooperation policy or border regime.

The European Neighbourhood Policy, Region-Building and Bordering

The chapter presents a review of the European Neighbourhood Policy’s diversified aims and of its realizations. In light of the main criticisms that authors and experts have expressed towards the EU’s attempts to extend its “normative power” beyond its external borders, the chapter presents an assessment of the ENP’s goals and narratives with a specific focus on its diversified regional strategies and on the perspectives for a multi-level governance of the policy. The aim is to show how the ENP is not a unitary but fragmented and controversial strategy: bordering and cross-bordering, homogenisations and differentiations, centrifugal and centripetal forces proceed side-by-side. Grasping the variety of these apparently contradictory forces, it is argued, is more useful in understanding the Neighbourhood Policy rather than referring to simple and ‘territorial’ metaphors such as “wider Europe”, on the one hand, or “fortress Europe” on the other.

Cross-Border Cooperation Along the EU's External Frontiers

The chapter focuses on cross‐border cooperation programmes between the EU border regions and their immediate neighbours. The chapter includes first a reflection on the role and the meaning of cross‐border cooperation in its historical development: from its application to the EU internal borders to its transfer towards non‐EU countries and to the European neighbourhood. The aim is to reflect on the changing significance of political borders in a Post‐Westaphalian “Europe of regions” and on the symbolic and material construction of the EU’s external frontiers. Secondly, the chapter presents a critical analysis of the narratives and the strategies of the cross-border cooperation initiatives launched within the ENP, in order to identify differences and tensions among different programmes and meso‐regions. The discussion of its cross‐border cooperation component, it is argued, is particularly useful for understanding the contradictions which arise from the implementation of the ENP, the variety of governance models by which the policy is implemented and the relevance and the function that borders and border regions have in the construction of a “wider Europe”. Moreover, the issues of Europeanization and transnational governance, and the attempts to strengthen territorial cohesion between the EU member States and the non‐EU neighbouring countries are discussed.