(17 December 2015) – Following the regional elections and the reform which reduced the number of regions in mainland France from 22 to 13, MOT (Mission Opérationnelle Transfrontalière) has published a note on the reform and its impact on cross-border cooperation.
The French Government has been pursuing a sweeping reform since 2012, which it has called Act III in the decentralisation process. The reform’s most visible impact is going to be a change in the boundaries of several regions as of January 2016.
By the end of the process, France will have only seventeen regions rather than the twenty-six that it has today.
Nine of the 13 new regions in mainland France are border regions and are involved in a territorial cooperation programme (INTERREG A): Alsace-Champagne-Ardenne-Lorraine, Aquitaine-Limousin-Poitou-Charentes, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Languedoc-Roussillon-Midi-Pyrénées, Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, Corsica, Normandy and Brittany.