Transboundery regional development: possibilities and challenges

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss the dynamics and challenges of Transboundary Regional Development in the region with a binational focus (Brazil and Paraguay), from an interdisciplinary approach (including Economics, Law, Political Science and International Relations), with a hypothetical methodology deductive, and with a search for data and references in bibliographies and databases of both countries. The cross-border condition of the cities of Foz do Iguassu, Brazil, with the Paraguayan cities of Ciudad del Este, Hernandarias and Presidente Franco, which are listed as “Linked Border Locations” in the Agreements between Brazil and Paraguay and in the Mercosur Linked Border Locations Agreement (2019), lack an understanding and articulated planning of Regional Development. This is a specificity to be studied in Cross-border Regional Development, sub-state and simultaneously international, not achieved by the material or legislative competences of the territory's political-administrative entities, pending corresponding decision-making and governance structures. These are areas covered and demarcated by also different legal and administrative formats, being, on one hand, a federative state (Brazil), with distribution between the Union, States and Municipalities, and, on the other, a unitary state (Republic of Paraguay), with departments and municipalities, which, on one side or the other, do not contemplate the perception of the cross-border region. In addition to the mechanisms of cross-border cooperation (Oddone, 2015) via paradiplomacy (Cornago, 1996) already known and eventually implemented, there are institutional vacuums in regional development planning pending institutionalization to encompass a concrete reality without a corresponding legal-administrative basis, creating obstacles to the social, economic and environmental process of the transboundary territory. Therefore, it will be necessary to characterize the reciprocal conditions of the development of the territory, which were leveraged by the infrastructure works of approximation, cooperation and binational integration (such as the Friendship Bridge, Itaipu Binational and the Integration Bridge in building), the foundations of its delimitation (binational and non-trinational) and the description of its complex and multidimensional transboundary region, seeking to lay conceptual bases for “Transborder Regional Development”.