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

The regional level has gained importance as a governance level in Austria in recent years. Social challenges 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 their enormous 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 function as system of regional governance. Above all, it is communication-associated attributes (inclusion, activation, networking, interdependencies and cooperative arrangements) that make these regions relevant interaction spaces. Mostly, regions have emerged that are active in the fields of regional policy and 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 not only different demarcations, actors and aims, they often run parallel to each other. Still, contemporary challenges of spatial development have made it possible to consider a further integration of different sectoral fields, in order to strengthen the finding of common solutions. On the example of a recent research and development project, the paper at hand will reflect in how far sectoral integration can support problem solving on the regional level and in how far the national level can support this integration on the regional level. The article not only provides insight into contemporary developments in regional policy in Austria, but further reflects on how tourism and regional policy can act as collaborative governance system. Results reveal that it needs a programmatic incentive to set-up collaboration, although interwoven challenges do exist.