Green infrastructure in the Galicia–Northern Portugal Euroregion: who is included in territorial planning?

Green infrastructure in a transboundary context

Green infrastructure is increasingly recognised as a key approach to addressing climate change across Southern Europe. By integrating a network of green spaces that provide ecosystem services and nature-based solutions into territorial planning, it is possible to enhance climate resilience, restore biodiversity, and improve quality of life in both urban and rural landscapes.

In regions such as the Galicia–Northern Portugal Euroregion, these strategies are particularly relevant. We are talking about a transboundary territory that currently faces environmental challenges that transcend administrative boundaries. Besides the rise of rural fires, dry seasons, more unpredictable extreme weather events, biodiversity loss, and landscape fragmentation, the region still holds significant ecological and cultural diversity that is certainly worth conserving and safeguarding.

In the following text, I delve into my own reflections as part of a project that aims to develop green infrastructure strategies for Galicia–Northern Portugal, reflecting on some of the successes and challenges of its current state.

The GreenGap project (2023–2026) is a cross-border initiative that promotes the implementation of green infrastructure across northern Portugal and Galicia. Through a series of actions in both urban and rural contexts, the development of the Methodological guide for local strategies for green infrastructure and adaptation to climate change, and three local strategies – in Ourense, Guimarães, and Paredes de Coura – the project explores how ecosystem services can be embedded into local planning practices.

A key strength of GreenGap lies in its collaborative structure, bringing together local administrations, regional authorities, universities, and research institutions. This creates a bridge between scientific knowledge and governance, supporting more informed and effective decision-making. At the same time, it highlights an important ongoing challenge: we need to make sure that such initiatives are both territorially inclusive and responsive to diverse regional realities.

Cultural dimensions and territorial inequalities in green infrastructure planning

While green infrastructure is increasingly promoted as a holistic and integrative approach to territorial planning, its implementation across the Galicia–Northern Portugal Euroregion reveals significant territorial asymmetries and conceptual limitations that deserve closer scrutiny.

A first critical issue concerns the spatial distribution of projects and partnerships. Current initiatives tend to concentrate disproportionately in coastal, more urbanised, and institutionally visible areas – such as Guimarães or Pontevedra – where administrative capacity, funding access, and political visibility related to climate action are stronger. In contrast, interior territories – particularly regions like Trás-os-Montes, which represent a significant part of the Galicia–Northern Portugal Euroregion – remain more absent from these frameworks.

I believe this absence reflects a deeper structural imbalance in how landscapes are prioritised within transboundary planning agendas. This exclusion is especially problematic given that these interior regions are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts in Southern Europe. Processes such as desertification, water scarcity, soil degradation, and demographic decline are not secondary issues. In fact, they are central to the long-term sustainability of the Iberian territory. Yet, despite their urgency, they are insufficiently addressed within flagship green infrastructure initiatives. The result is a paradox: regions with the greatest need for systemic solutions are often those least represented in their design and implementation.

Beyond this territorial gap, there is also a conceptual limitation in how landscape is understood within green infrastructure frameworks. Although the discourse frequently invokes integration – of ecosystems, services, and stakeholders – in practice, there remains a strong bias towards biophysical and ecological dimensions. Biodiversity, habitat connectivity, and hydrological regulation are extensively mapped, quantified, and operationalised. However, the anthropogenic and cultural dimensions of landscape are still marginally incorporated.

Cultural ecosystem services, for instance, are typically included as part of ecosystem service assessments, but often through instrumental approaches. They are quantified, categorised, or indirectly addressed through participatory processes, yet rarely engaged as structuring forces in territorial systems. This creates a methodological and epistemological gap: cultural relationships to landscape – such as memory, symbolic meaning, and everyday practices – are acknowledged but not deeply integrated into planning logics.

This is particularly evident in hinterland contexts, where landscape is inseparable from longstanding socio-ecological practices. In regions like Trás-os-Montes, water is not only a resource to be managed, but also a cultural and symbolic element embedded in local cosmologies, seasonal rituals, and communal governance systems. Similarly, land-use patterns, agro-silvo-pastoral systems, and vernacular spatial structures reflect accumulated knowledge that shapes both ecological resilience and cultural continuity.

And, actually, we do know that the abandonment of most traditional ways of living was a key agent in landscape transformations, so how are we supposed to work on green infrastructure if the relationship between planning and the people who actually live in – or have left – the territories is not central to the process?

The fact is that these dimensions remain largely external to the operational frameworks of green infrastructure. The prevailing models tend to interpret landscape through a more technical lens, privileging what can be measured, mapped, and standardised, and with that a major underrepresentation of what is experiential, relational, and intangible arises. As a result, there is a risk of reproducing a form of ecological planning that, despite its sustainability goals, remains detached from the lived realities of the territories it seeks to transform.

Towards more inclusive and integrated planning

I believe that, to address these limitations, we need a shift in both perspective and practice. Rather than treating cultural dimensions as supplementary, they should be more included as constitutive elements of socio-ecological systems. This implies engaging with interdisciplinary approaches that bridge environmental planning, anthropology, landscape studies, and other fields that may help us recognise local knowledge and cultural practices as critical components of resilience.

Moreover, achieving a more equitable territorial approach demands the inclusion of underrepresented regions in the design and governance of green infrastructure initiatives. This is more than a matter of spatial justice because, without addressing the specific conditions of hinterland landscapes, any regional strategy for climate adaptation will remain incomplete.

Ultimately, the challenge is not only to expand green infrastructure geographically, but to deepen it conceptually. Only by integrating ecological processes with cultural meanings and territorial diversity can green infrastructure fully realise its potential as a transformative tool for climate resilience in Southern Europe. 

Author

Inês Francisca Oliveira is an architect and doctoral researcher in anthropology at the University of Lisbon, currently studying the intersections between ritual purification, cultural landscapes, and territorial planning in Trás-os-Montes, Portugal. Her research emphasises the importance of inclusive and ecologically holistic approaches to landscape management, particularly in rural regions facing cultural and environmental losses.