Capacity building in European macro-regions – the role of training  

Venue: Instituto Andaluz de Administración Pública (IAAP), Sevilla 

Date:  4th - 6th November 2010 

The concept of “macro-region” is of growing importance within the context of the current debate on the future of territorial cohesion in Europe. It was officially introduced by the European Commission with the launch of its Strategy for the Mediterranean Union in 2007, followed by two later initiatives: the strategy for the Baltic cooperation in 2008 and the strategy for the Danube in 2009/2010. At the level of the Council of Europe the strategies for the Euro regions of the Black Sea and the Adria are also aiming to develop a more “macro-regional” approach, strengthening cooperation and democratic capacity-building - with a specific focus on local and regional authorities. 

The existing macro-regional approaches in Europe are structured along a specific geographical feature linking different states and national territories: they are all constituted around highly symbolic natural borders (rivers, seas) which had a strong separating function in the past and which are now to become a platform for successful and peaceful cooperation between different political, administrative and socio-economic contexts. Secondly, macro-regions can be characterized by their specific function as interface between “old” and “new” democracies, economic, societal an politico-administrative systems. They allow direct exchanges, knowledge transfers, mutual learning and the integrated development of complementary potentialities between Western and South-Eastern countries. They can thus be seen as symbols and laboratories for European integration, communication and sometimes even reconciliation. 

Capacity building both at the level of the individual political/ administrative actors and the respective institutions involved is a core challenge and highly strategic issue within macro-regions. For the moment the defined strategies are still in a way suffering from a lack of policy-implementation. Training both on the dissemination of the macro-regional strategies themselves as well as on the institutional and individual preconditions needed for a successful cooperation, can thus be seen as a central lever in order to develop the internal potentialities of such macro-regions and to avoid bottlenecks for future cooperation. 

However, the issue of training has never been brought up for a structured reflexion in the context of macro-regions so far. As more and more strategies for macro-regions are defined at the different European levels, the need is obvious to dedicate an international conference to this issue, using the potentialities and expertise of ENTO. The general objective of the Annual Conference is to exchange on training needs within a European macro-regional context and to identify and define concrete projects for future training-programmes in this respect. With this approach also the visibility of ENTO on the European level shall be improved and ENTO shall be placed within a European topic of strategic relevance.