Determinants of Effective Cross-Border Cooperation

The world over local communities broach international boundaries.  The borders of the Westphalian system of states have a differentiating effect on policy regimes.  This article hypothesizes that the degrees of collaboration, coordination and cooperation are a function of these communities’ capacity to reduce the transaction costs that differing policy regimes on either side of the border impose.  Scrutiny of this hypothesis, however, requires us to control for variation in a local community’s interaction.  Two phenomena over the past 20 years provide for such variation: the end of the Cold War resulted in new borders that now divided communities that had hitherto functioned as one; the security measures in the aftermath of 9/11 had a similarly deleterious effect on the way cross-border communities functioned.  Narva/Ivangorad across the Estonian-Russian border is an example of the former; Stanstead/Derby Line across the Canada-United States border an example of the latter.  To explain variation across each case study’s outcomes, the paper uses collective-efficacy theory to measure each community’s response as a function of existing networks, supportive institutions, spatial dynamics, leadership, rate of change, economic cost, and organizational capacity.  The findings not only disentangle determinants of collective efficacy among cross-border communities but also provide the beginnings of a model  to facilitate effective cross-border engagement when local communities are confronted with events beyond their control that give rise to national policies with adverse effects on cross-border communities.