| Summary: | Abstract A predominant academic question is how and why the development paths of municipalities and regions take certain forms. In recent decades, geographers and economists in particular have investigated the dynamics of how local institutional conditions and their local mobilisation can affect development outcomes and how development is determined by “structural” forces such as state- and EU-based regulations and globalisation of the economy. Thus, the notion that historical sensitiveness and context-dependency are essential factors in local and regional development and growth has gained credence. Then again, municipalities and regions are not “islands” of development but integral parts of complex socio-spatial relations and processes. From this viewpoint, border municipalities and regions are eminently interesting research contexts as they are sites where different scalar political interests, institutional structures, and development discourses are continuously manifested, materialised and contested in the daily practices of local and regional actors. Nevertheless, this thesis argues that the existing mainstream studies investigating the development paths and prospects of border regions and municipalities are, firstly, overly EU-centric and, secondly, have an overly limited perspective on the institutional environment and legacy in which local and regional actors operate. The main attention in this regard has often been on the institutional differences between states and nationalities. In order to understand the development prospects of border areas and the preconditions of transnational regionalisation, municipal planning of border areas needs to be approached not only from the perspective of EU-driven cross-border co-operation and building of “transnational” scale, but more comprehensively. Accordingly, the present research on the Finnish-Swedish border area, which is an internal border area of the EU, takes a more historically and contextually sensitive institutional approach in this regard. Investigating ...
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