Projects are today´s central governmental organizations, which actually means a change from government to governance, more like to a partnership-kind-of relation. Projects are funded with budgets and the relation is defined with contracts. This phenomenon is called project society. European Union has had a major impact on this development. The impacts of EU-funded projects on, for example employment and economy have been studied a lot, but impacts on tourism or cooperation in the field of tourism have been neglected in researches.

The empirical case of this research is Visit Arctic Europe project (VAE) which is funded by Interreg Nord. The purpose of this project is to make Northern-Scandinavia an attractive integrated tourism destination with common vision. The goal of this research is to find out how EU-funded projects effect on tourism business. The detailed research questions are related to the Visit Arctic Europe project: how the project has effected on the tourism in the Arctic Europe, the cooperation practices there and what kind of practices is there in the VAE-region. I studied cooperation practices with the help of multi-method approach. EU-funded projects use Logical Framework Approach as a method. It is a tool in planning and implementing development projects. The tool produces a matrix as a result, which I used to gather most of the quantitative material of the impacts the project has on tourism and cooperation practices in the area. The qualitative material I collected with theme interviews which I analyzed using theory-based content analysis in order to find essential dimensions of tourism cooperation. I formed these dimensions based on the material itself, but before that I themed it up by asking questions based on practice theory based aproach.

It came up that VAE-project has had a positive influence on Northern-Scandinavia´s tourism, especially on the overnights by international tourists in the area and the cooperation with international tour operators. The project has created possibilities to the tourism industry to tighten and develop cross-border cooperation which is significant especially according to one of mine dimensions of tourism cooperation, closeness. Dimensions which stand out from the material were in addition to closeness (both mentally and physically), benefit and professionalism. The quantitative material is going to be used for follow-up for five years to continue to measure the success of the project. The qualitative material and the results of this research can be used to develop cross-border tourism cooperation, not just in VAE-area but other similar tourism areas as well with borders of multiple nations. Visit Arctic Europe is a magnificent example of what is possible to achieve in the field of tourism with the help of EU-funded projects.