Council of European Municipalities and Regions (CEMR)
European section of United Cities and Local Governments


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Local and Regional Dialogues on Cohesion Policy

Local and regional dialogues - 15.04.2018

Cohesion policy has to cover all territories and its investment need to be highlighted to citizens
Respectively on 16 March in Romainville (France) and in Graz (Austria), and on 19 March in Udine (Italy) and in Sunsdsvall (Sweden), local dialogues gathered citizens, local governments, associations, academics as well as other stakeholders to discuss the added value of cohesion policy.
Among the major conclusions and key recommendations:
 
  • Maintain a cohesion policy covering all the French territories, in their diversity, and better articulate the programmes with the dynamics and the needs of the different actors involved at local and regional levels (institutional, economic and social field). (Romainville 9th dialogue)
  • EU cohesion policy and funds allow to achieve the goals of the Europe 2020 strategy, as well as the regional development strategy that could not be achieved only via national resources. In the area of research and innovations for instance, it supports research with concrete market applications as well as with long-term investment. (Udine 11th dialogue, Sundsvall 12th dialogue). An example presented in Udine was a research project from a publishing house to encourage community-shared information to create digital maps for tourism and security purposes. The new maps were so successful, they were adopted by the mountain rescue service.
  • Lack of awareness from citizens of projects funded under cohesion policy in the region, however interest in the topic is high. One recommendation from project beneficiaries was to link projects’ funding with an additional budget line for project promotion. The communication strategy could be co-created with citizens and associations in order to ensure its positive impact (Graz 10th dialogue)
  • More involvement of local authorities, the closest institutions to citizens, in the design of the cohesion policy. Simplifying procedures will allow all the municipalities to be actively part of the process. (Udine 11th dialogue)
 
To stay tuned, please visit CEMR’s dedicated webpage to the project
The reports of past events are available here.
Follow and contribute to the Twitter debate with the #EUinmyregion hashtag, and discover the dialogues as if you were there thanks to our video playlist  and Flickr account .
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