The main objective of the GEOSPECS project is to provide a coherent transversal framework to characterise the past trends, state and potential future developments of geographical specificities for territorial policy and regional development.
One reason for exploring geographic specificities is that concepts such as "mountain", "island", "sparsely populated" and "border" have a strong federative power, creating a sense of commonality among regional actors from across Europe concerned by a given type of "geographic specificity".
A secondary objective of this study is to facilitate the integration of this sense of commonality and of the discourses constructed to justify specific treatments, on the basis of geographic specificities, in European territorial cohesion strategies.