Assessing the social and cultural impacts of the European Capital of Culture programme in cross-border regions. A research agenda

The paper delivers a comparative overview of the research on capturing the impacts of the European Capital of Culture (ECoC) programme by connecting the literature on urban regeneration with the literature on sustainable development. We observe a shift from assessing mainly the economic impacts towards the challenging task of capturing the social and cultural impacts in the context of the increasing preoccupation for assuring a long-term legacy of the programme. The paper also provides a comparative examination of the research methodology (impacts and indicators) for the self-evaluation proposed by three future ECoCs placed in cross-border regions: Timisoara 2021, Novi Sad 2021 and Esch-sur-Alzette 2022. Comparing data, we observed that different ECoCs have similar discursive understandings of the social and cultural impacts of the title. Still, they use different fine-tunes indicators for measuring these impacts or the cross-border cooperation, which is a neglected aspect of the ECoC evaluation.