Paper short abstract:

In cultural interaction across and at the EU/national borders cultural sustainability, as a development concept and as local doing of border crossings, has both de- and re-bordering roles in terms of defining places. Here also borderland materiality has a role to play.

Paper long abstract:

The Finnish-Russian and Polish-Ukrainian borderlands offer possibilities for comparing "sustainability practices" in terms of the way they may contribute in redefining places and cross-border relations at the external border of the EU. Here policies and EU funded projects are based on ideas of sustainable development as well as cultural diversity. These seem to be 'good' ideas by definition and also suggest that the same would to go for the co-operational practices they result in. It is, however, another matter how such practices of cooperation become localized. In these ceded borderlands there is no one way of defining some borderland cultural sustainability since there is hardly any one way of defining cultural heritage and its authenticity. When adopted by cultural institutions, organizations and their actors, cultural sustainability seems become a way of emphasizing local agency. In projects, they seem to make alternative cultural claims about localities as well as their location at the border. Here ideas of sustainability tend to address culture in places but they may also imply cross-border belongings. Here cultural heritage becomes actualized by the actors in a way that points out the importance of border crossings as 'cultural duties' to people and/or things. Cultural sustainability seems to mean a way of pointing out the relevant scales of heritage. Rather than a static resource, 'heritage' defines also competences for right kinds of border-crossings. Here the border needs to be faced but is it a place?