Rescaling through projectification in the EU’s higher education regionalism

The political project of creating a European higher education (HE) space depends on the creation of interlinkages among HE policy stakeholders. Referred to as regionalization, in the European Union (EU) this process relies on the acquisition of EU funding, which traditionally is implemented through projects. While scholarship has tackled the reliance on projects to implement policy, the spatial implications of this projectification are underresearched. This is striking given that the implementation and development of project-based cooperation entails rescaling practices. Rescaling captures how economic, social and political interrelations are moved to new territorial levels above, below, and across the nation-state. This study focuses on rescaling in the EU HE regionalism and asks how projectified EU policies move interrelations of HE policy stakeholders to new territorial levels. A theoretical framework is developed that allows to capture how projectification leads to rescaling by allocating resources to a new scale and by establishing structures and cooperation activities at a new scale. To analyse the rescaling practices that result from the implementation of EU funded projects, this paper attends to the region-building strategies of HE actors and governments in border regions. The latter actors rely on the EU’s funding for cross-border cooperation, i.e. Interreg. The analysis provides that rescaling through projectification lets the institutional arrangements of the EU HE regionalism intertwine. With intergovernmental cooperation, community programmes and organizational cooperation becoming increasingly interdependent, the supranational HE space is fostered.