The European Union's Cross-Border Cooperation (CBC) programmes play a pivotal role in linking islands in the Indian Ocean, Atlantic, and Mediterranean with one another and with the European, African, and Asian continents. By fostering good neighborliness among contiguous states, island nations, local and regional authorities, separated by seas or oceans, CBC promotes tailored territorial collaboration across shared maritime borders. Of particular relevance to insular territories, these initiatives tackle shared challenges like insularity, exacerbated by climate change and economic pressures.

This paper examines, from a geo-legal perspective, how CBC can be strategically aligned with the 2025 European Ocean Pact's call for "tailored policies and better synergies" to unlock the untapped potential of EU maritime cross-border cooperation. Adopting a comparative case study approach, it scrutinizes EU programme evaluations and official documents from a number of paradigmatic CBC frameworks in the Indian Ocean, Atlantic (including the Caribbean) and the Mediterranean. Preliminary analysis uncovers synergies, such as to fund blue innovation hubs, improve regulatory convergence, multi-level governance, and funding silos. The paper will identify the main obstacles for CBC and put forward proposals to bolster EU external action, fostering resilient ties in a geopolitically contested world.

The stability of the Pacific Islands region is important to protect key EU trade routes and supply chains. In a context of geopolitical instability, the EU and its member states, as do other external actors in the region, have scrambled to access the extensive resources in the vast Exclusive Economic Zones of Pacific Island nations such as fish—not least tuna--, and reserves of critical minerals. EU actors have also banked on the influence of Pacific Island countries at the UN and other fora to jointly defend climate change policy as well as other priorities. Against this backdrop, EU efforts to maintain its role and credibility as a development actor in the Pacific Islands region face multiple challenges. Whilst the EU has increasingly aligned its development programmes with the priorities of Pacific Island nations, its emphasis on the Indo-Pacific and the growing securitization of EU aid in the region, have clashed with Pacific Island countries’ own security priorities in addressing environmental degradation and climate change. EU efforts to channel its programmes via the main regional organizations in the Pacific have met with limited success. This contribution examines the evolution of EU development and partnerships efforts in the region. It seeks to understand to what extent EU development policies towards Pacific Island nations have sufficiently acknowledged their traditional knowledge and agency in jointly addressing climate change challenges via regional cooperation, coordinating at the international level and fostering connectivity initiatives through both sea and land rooted in their cognitive priors.

With the advent of political rivalries in the Pacific in the frame of Western and Indian narratives about the Indo-Pacific, small island Pacific States have attracted increased attention from outside powers, China, the United States, Japan, but also France and the European Union, all vying to develop partnerships and cooperation with States in the area to foster their political presence in this disputed area.

In this context, the EU developed the Global Gateway program, a concept that reformatted economic aid and provide the EU with a tool thought to be more effective to answer China’s Belt and Road Initiative. How is the Global Gateway concept being used in the Pacific, with what results ?