During 20-22 November 2018, BIOREGIO is attending the ETC University - SmarTransnational Cooperation event, organized by the Ministry of Regional Development and Public Administration in Bucharest, Romania.
The event includes presentations of some of the best Romanian results obtained under European Territorial Cooperation programmes, training in strategic and financial project planning techniques, communication and capitalization instruments.
On the first day of the event, Erwin Siweris, Programme Director of INTERREG EUROPE has attended the debate session on the future of European Territorial Cooperation between 2021 - 2027, alongside with relevant actors at national and international level. One of the main topics of the discussion was the proposal of the European Commission to discontinue the INTERREG EUROPE and URBACT programmes for the next programming period and to manage centrally the newly proposed programmes. The opinions expressed by the participants were that INTERREG EUROPE and URBACT are making an important contribution to the EU cohesion policy and that Romanian stakeholders have derived multiple benefits from them.
It was also emphasized that it was statistically demonstrated that the participation of less developed regions in centrally managed programmes is rather scarce, while their involvement in shared cooperation programmes is significant.
The conclusion was that discontinuing such cohesion programmes and managing centrally the new instruments would increase the disparities between more developed regions and the ones lagging behind instead of supporting cooperation to help less developed regions to catch up.
