Planning beyond administrative borders: Non-standard geographies and transboundary commons in the Prespa Lake basin

The Prespa Lakes region, shared by Albania, Greece, and North Macedonia, is a critical ecological hotspot and an old transboundary landscape that defies standard linear, growth-bound administrative planning paradigms. Positioned at the intersection of European Union environmental directives, national cohesion mandates, and Western Balkan enlargement dynamics, the region still remains economically vulnerable and institutionally fragmented. This paper uses Prespa as a laboratory to unpack the interaction between top-down green transition agendas and state border configurations with the lived realities of peripheral communities and fragile ecosystems. This paper steps back from the usual Eurocentric approaches to regional planning. Instead, it is based on the mutual shaping of space and society, combining a multi-layered understanding of spatial justice in distribution, procedures, and recognition, with three new perspectives: non-standard geographies (ESPON, 2026), epistemic peripherality (Hilton & Pesarini, 2026), and More-Than-Human spatial justice (Fieuw et al., 2022). In this wider lens, the paper explores the continuing environmental collapse and growing social divisions of the basin. It finds that the usual governance centred on the border has not prevented environmental damage nor produced fairness for local communities. The empirical research is based on detailed territorial explorations, land-use mapping and an analysis of regional cooperation mechanisms within the framework of Prespa Park across its tri-national sectors. The findings reveal great inequalities in the distribution of resources and development incentives among the three national zones, showing that local, smallholder agricultural knowledge has been systematically ignored or sidelined by centralised state agendas. While these structural and environmental imbalances impact communities throughout the basin-particularly where intensive commercial production methods clash with conservation boundaries-they manifest most acutely within the marginalised Albanian municipality of Pustec. To solve these problems, the paper proposes a forward-looking and landscape-orientated strategy that links cross-border ecological benefits with a flexible approach to regional planning. The framework reimagines traditional farmland as one that benefits communities and the environment in a number of ways. Importantly, the paper discusses the tensions between supporting people's livelihoods and protecting the environment; points to uneven power dynamics along the EU borders; reflects on the risk of academic outsiders taking over local discussions, and charts a path toward a holistic, multi-species cohabitation. It finds that a just and sustainable transition in these sensitive border regions requires a move away from thinking about growth at all costs and a move towards new models of shared knowledge, cross-border cooperation and care for all forms of life.