The France-Balkans network held its annual steering committee in Brussels, in the Committee of the Regions on 24 January 2012. The French partners had the opportunity to discuss the recent decision by the Auvergne Regional Council to transfer the leadership to the Pays Vichy Auvergne.
The multilateral decentralised cooperation France-Balkans programme aims at promoting the development of good governance at regional and local level and improving capacities of local authorities to allow them to function and to provide good services to their citizens. This project proposes to achieve this objective by creating a network of French local authorities involved in the Balkan and Balkan stakeholders in order to work on a common plan which would open the programme to other partners in Europe.
The partners reiterated the political dimension to the network aiming at strengthening and stabilising the democratic process in the Balkan region; supporting the European integration process of candidate and potential candidate countries; opening the French territories to cooperation with other local and regional authorities in Balkan countries.
At the meeting, the partners had an exchange of view with a representative of the French Embassy and two representatives of the Directorate General of Enlargement with whom they discussed about the contribution by French but also European local authorities to the EU enlargement process. In this perspective, the partners gave a new spin to the programme by enhancing the importance of territorial approach to development as a contribution to European integration of the Balkans. They also confirmed their interest to the multi-actor multi-sector approach, which aims at gathering expertise and contributions from political, social and economic stakeholders interested in investing in the Balkans and therefore opening new opportunities for cooperation and investment at European level.
They also finalised the action plan for 2012 which consists of three events in 2012 on topics such as tourism and open air activities, water management, new technologies and human rights.
Finally, the partners renewed their commitment to the networking activities and decided to open the network to more French but also other European partners such as Italy, Austria but also Turkey.
The partners renewed their commitment to the networking activities and decided to open the network to more French but also other European partners.
For more information please see the agenda and the list of participants.
