The Territorial Dimension of EU Knowledge PoliciesBy AlinaFelder‐Stindt, London: Routledge, 2025. 228 pp. 175€ (hardcover). ISBN: 9781032785196

“The territorial dimension of EU knowledge policies” by Alina Felder-Stindt is an impressive piece of scholarly work that investigates the hidden feedback loops between the European Union (EU)'s regional policy, the EU's higher education policy and the higher education policy pursued by higher education institutions in cross-border regions. The book starts by asking how the EU regional policy, which constitutes about one-third of the overall European budget, influences the comparatively weakly endowed EU higher education policy, onto which the EU has only supporting competences. The book relies on a comparative case study design that analyses higher education institutions in border regions that have benefitted from funds from EU Territorial Cooperation (Interreg), namely the University of the Greater Region (UniGR), composed of six institutions from Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg and the International Association of Lake Constance Universities (IBH), a cooperation among 30 higher education institutions from Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein and Switzerland. A rich qualitative analysis of primary sources, including an impressive interview corpus with policy officers and institutional representatives, and of secondary documents constitutes the empirical material of the book. The theoretical model of this book is an important addition to our understanding of the linkages between different policy areas (in this case, EU regional and higher education policy) and the connections between supranational and national levels of policy-making. Felder-Stindt argues that the formulation of the EU's strategies for competitiveness (e.g., the Lisbon strategy and the Europe 2020 strategy) creates opportunities to deploy regional policy through the argument of facilitating the growth of all regions in Europe. This logic reverberates in the formulation of a regional policy that, with time, becomes explicitly connected to higher education, conceiving of the nexus between these policy areas as a way to harness productivity and employment (‘smart growth’). Regional policy, then, encourages the involvement of sub-national actors in border regions, chiefly higher education institutions. Their collaboration is incentivised by and feeds off pre-existing cooperation and leads to practices of ‘adjustment’, involving the creation of new cooperative structures and practices but also changes in rationales for cooperation. The creation of UniGr as an actor with its own legal personality in 2015 is a prominent example of how higher education institutions adjust in response to EU regional policy. Last but certainly not least, Felder-Stindt highlights how these adjustment processes feed back into regional policy by (attempting to) change the opportunity structures of regional policy and influencing the beliefs and behaviours of the higher education institutions that ultimately become the on-the-ground co-creators of EU regional policy. Although this book has significant implications for the fields of European and regional studies, I will focus on two significant lessons for social policy. First, this book demonstrates that the feedback effects emanating from European strategies for competitiveness cast a long shadow and engender complex feedback effects that may reverberate in areas beyond those in which the EU has formal competencies, a case in point being education policy. Alina Felder-Stindt documents how higher education institutions located in cross-border regions become involuntary actors in EU regional policy. This argument should teach scholars to look beyond the usual suspects in social policy-making and investigate cases in which creative and powerful actors emerge unexpectedly, not least when prompted by global ‘imperatives’ such as the pursuit of competitiveness or the creation of a ‘knowledge economy’. Second, this book shows that once Europeanization starts, because it involves (sub-)national actors in different parts of the process, it takes a sort of life of its own and feeds itself by, for example, (re-)shaping expectations and behaviours of the actors working within higher education institutions in cross-border regions. This work shows that separating policy areas can be difficult if not impossible, for they co-constitute each other, and suggests the consideration of their points of juncture instead of their artificial separation, as a productive way forward. In conclusion, I recommend Alina Felder-Stindt's book to social policy scholars interested in better understanding the connection between the supranational and the sub-national and in challenging the stability of borders between policy areas. The author declares no conflicts of interest.