Introduction The concentration of economic activity in metropolitan regions is without doubt one of the most striking aspects of contemporary economic geography (Barnes and Ledebur, 1991; Kra« tke, 2007). This process of metropolisation goes hand in hand with a redefinition of the traditional prerogatives of states in relation to urban centres and with a regeneration of cities as territorial (Brenner, 2004; Le Gale© s and Harding, 1998) and international actors (Ku« bler and Piliutyte, 2007). In this way the state has passed from the role of a top-down resource-allocating and regulatory authority to that of a partner and mediator (Kohler-Koch, 1996). As Jessop (2004) argues, this reconfiguration of the role of the state is organised based on two privileged directions. By transferring part of their sovereignty to a supranational authority, the member states of the European Union (EU) have contributed to the construction of an economic system of regulation and to the removal of obstacles that may have impeded exchanges between them (Scharpf, 1999). At the same time the reforms of government functions carried out since the 1980söincluding a transfer of authority and resources to local governments, deregulations, and privatisations (Rodr|¨guez-Pose and Sandall, 2008) öhave given new room for manoeuver to a large number of actors such as public agencies, local and regional authorities, firms, and nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). These different processes have participated in the emergence of multilevel governance within the framework of the EU (Hooghe, 1996). In this context many studies relating to metropolitan governance have shown the difficulty of building institutional territories of cooperation. One of the reasons is that the types of cooperation, when they exist, often take place within narrow parameters

This paper provides evidence of how national borders affect the structure of policy networks. Our analysis of the Basel cross-border metropolitan region located across Switzerland, France and Germany considers the case of public transportation in border regions. Using a social network analysis of the relationships between 44 actors, we show that national borders play a diminishing role in the formation of policy networks for both information exchange and decision making. Local actors develop different brokerage roles according to their country of origin: Swiss actors function as coordinator and representative brokers vis-à-vis actors located in France and Germany.

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