Collaborative governance across sectors: regional development and tourism as complementary policy fields?

The regional level has gained importance as a control level in Austria in recent years. Socialchallenges such as climate protection, mobility, sustainable economic development, demographic change,integration, digitalization and much more can no longer be mastered by single municipalities due to theirenormous complexity and their spatial implication beyond the local level. Throughout the Austrian territory,numerous spaces exist that are perceived as regions, which are (very differently) organized and functionas system of regional governance. Above all, it is communication-associated attributes (inclusion,activation, networking, interdependencies and cooperative arrangements) that make these regions relevantinteraction spaces. Mostly, regions have emerged that are active in the fields of regional policyand development. Anyway, additional spatial configurations exist that have developed a governance level,such as tourism regions. As these spaces often – due to the different sectors they belong to – have notonly different demarcations, actors and aims, they often run parallel to each other. Still, contemporarychallenges of spatial development have made it possible to consider a further integration of differentsectoral fields, in order to strengthen the finding of common solutions. On the example of a recent researchand development project, the paper at hand will reflect in how far sectoral integration can supportproblem solving on the regional level and in how far the national level can support this integrationon the regional level. The article not only provides insight into contemporary developments in regionalpolicy in Austria, but further reflects of how tourism and regional policy can act as collaborative governancesystems. Results reveal that it needs a programmatic incentive to set-up collaboration, although interwovenchallenges do exist.