Cross-border collaboration in economic development: institutional change on the Anglo-Scottish border

This article considers how changes in institutional structures affect the motivations of policymakers towards collaboration across borders. The Anglo-Scottish Border is used to illustrate the varied motivations for cross-border collaboration using models of partnership working. Adapting recent frameworks of analysis based on the concept of cross-border regional innovation systems, the Anglo-Scottish border is used to show how institutional changes can alter the balance between symmetries and asymmetries that tend to characterize cross-border relationships. Due to progressive devolution of functions to the Scottish Parliament since the 1990s, there are increasing contrasts in institutional settings and policy frameworks across this sub-state border. The nature of cross-border collaboration in two time periods is compared and contrasted. The first took place during 2000–2004 under the banner of “Border Visions.” This is contrasted with the more recent attempts to stimulate cross-border collaboration in the context of the Referendum on Scottish Independence in 2014. It is shown that the motivations for cross-border working can shift in response to changes in the economy and also in response to interactions between policy debates that occur simultaneously at different spatial scales.