On the 22nd and 23rd of March 2017 Manita Koop, the lead partner of the SWARE project, attended to the well organised interregional cooperation forum "Europe, let’s cooperate" in Malta to share her experience, ideas and knowledge.
She had an active part in the plenary session on interregional cooperation. The main advice was the importance of personal contact with the partners. For the selection of the partners she highlighted that mainly three points are important. First, prepare a project abstract where the issue addressed and objectives are clearly and precisely defined. Your potential partners need to understand exactly what and who you are looking for. Second, use your existing networks to identify good partners. For example, we use our previous INTERREG IVC project and we also work with our development agency who knew some good organisations in Europe. Third, take into consideration the programme’s requirements.
She also had an active part in the parallel workshop Designing project methodology. An important aspect of the workshop was the involvement of the stakeholders. We developed an institutional learning group surrounded by satellite groups. Every region is different and this means you need to adjust the methodology to the region.
The overall objective of the SWARE project is to foster integrated management of natural and cultural heritage within inland waterway regions by improving the partner regions’ related policy instruments in order to create a better balance between the protection and sustainable exploitation of the natural resources and the built heritage sites.
Project SWARE is implemented with the support of European Regional Development Fund and Interreg Europe Programme 2014-2020. This publication reflects the author's views only and the Interreg Europe programme authorities are not liable for any use that may be made of the information contained therein.
