LISER wishes to congratulate Tim Cassiers on successfully defending his PhD thesis on September 26 at the Katholieke Universiteit of Leuven (Belgium). He was awarded the title of Doctor in Geography (KUL does not confer any honours). 

His thesis was supervised by LISER researcher Dr. Christophe Sohn and Prof. Christian Kesteloot of KUL. Research funding was made possible with the support of the AFR individual PhD grant from the Luxembourg National Research Fund (FNR).

“Politics… or just Work” ? On the role of territoriality in policy networks. The case of transportation policies in the cross-border metropolitan regions of Brussels and Luxembourg

Summary of Research:

Cross-border metropolitan regions are well integrated from a functional point of view, but are at the same time strongly divided by borders. Those form institutional  discontinuities on the one hand and prompt different political-cultural traditions on the other.  From a pragmatic point of view, several issues such as cross-border commuting flows, urge a collaborative effort from the different institutional actors in order to steer or manage the processes at hand. Thus, problem-solving networks are bound to arise, for example around transportation planning. In practice, it is often noted how thes networks fall short in designing coherent policies. This PhD dissertation explores why this is the case, zooming in on the notion of territoriality - the attempt to controll human action within a certain geographic area. I argue that cooperation at the metropolitan level is not always a straightforward option, but a choice that will only be taken up as far as each actor finds an advantage in doing so, while not hampering his own interests in the metropolitan balance.  Analysing the transportation policies in the cross-border metropolitan regions of Brussels and Luxembourg, I show how the border is very present in the policy networks as in the discourses, and demonstrate how actors play out the institutional and meaning-giving frames that are projected upon the presence of the border. I conclude that actors should not shun away from the larger debates on metropolitan visions and the meaning of the borders, and should fully assert that metropolitan planning the metropolitan region is "Politics", and not "just Work".