A cross-border region is a territorial entity that is made of several local or regional authorities that are co-located yet belong to different nation states. Cross-border regions exist to take advantage of geographical conditions to strengthen their competitiveness. Cross-border regions in Europe In Europe, there are a large number of cross-border regions. Some of them are often referred to as 'Euroregions' although this is an imprecise concept that is used for a number of different arrangements. European cross-border regions are most commonly constituted through co-operation among border municipalities, districts or regions. Many cross-border regions receive financial support from the European Commission via its Interreg programme. They vary in their legal and administrative set-up but have in common that they are not 'regions' in an administrative-constitutional sense. Many cross-border regions are based on some sort of civil-law agreements among the participating authorities. For instance, the classical form of a Euroregion is the ‘twin association’: On each side of the border, municipalities and districts form an association according to a legal form suitable within their own national legal systems. In a second step, the associations then join each other on the basis of a civil-law cross-border agreement to establish the cross-border entity. Many Euroregions along the Germany-Benelux border are established according to this model, following the initiatives by the EUREGIO. History The first European cross-border region, the EUREGIO, was established in 1958 on the Dutch-German border, in the area of Enschede (NL) and Gronau (DE). Since then, Euroregions and other forms of cross-border co-operation have developed throughout Europe. For local and regional authorities, engaging in cross-border regions meant they entered a field long reserved for central state actors. For dealing with issues such as local cross-cross-border spatial planning or transport policy, in the 1960s and 1970s various bi-lateral and multi-lateral governmental commissions were established without granting access to local authorities (Aykaç 1994). They dealt with issues such as local cross-border spatial planning and transport policy. But over the last thirty years the scope for non-central governments (NCGs) to co-operate across borders has widened considerably. To a large degree, this can be related to macro-regional integration in Europe. In particular, two supranational bodies, the Council of Europe and the European Union, were important for improving the conditions under which NCGs could co-operate across borders. Whereas the Council of Europe was in past particularly active in improving the legal situation, the Commission of the