Conference on Borders and Governance

3 December 2013, Chateau Portales, Strasbourg

Prospects for effective transfrontier co-operation in Europe

Speech of Breda PEČAN, (Slovenia, SOC) Rapporteur for transfrontier co-operation of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe

Dear friends, I would like to thank the University of Strasbourg, for organising this conference and inviting me to speak. I would also like to thank my fellow speakers for giving us such excellent food for thought.

I would like to give you some information about the recent work of the Council of Europe’s Congress of Local and Regional Authorities and to invite you to contribute to our future work.

Allow me to introduce myself: my name is Breda Pečan and I am a member of the Slovenian delegation of the Congress. I am a member of the Governance Committee and the rapporteur for transfrontier cooperation.

I am also Vice-Mayor, and former Mayor, of the town of Izola, a Slovenian town on the Adriatic coast of the Istrian peninsula, sandwiched between Italy and Croatia, so I have had a lot of experience, both good and bad, of transfrontier cooperation, which may explain why I was appointed rapporteur.

In May last year, our Governance Committee and the Euro-Institute organised a seminar on ‘Multi-level governance in transfrontier cooperation’ in Innsbruck, Austria. During this seminar we looked at case studies of transfrontier cooperation in Austria, Germany and Ukraine and also took stock of the work that the Congress has already carried out in this field.

That seminar gave birth to a Congress report and resolution, which will serve to give direction to our future work on this subject.  We were lucky to have Mr Joachim BECK (he should be in the room) help us research and prepare this excellent report, which is entitled “Prospects for effective transfrontier co-operation in Europe”.   The Congress adopted it just a few weeks ago at its plenary session.

The report notes an important and positive trend in European transfrontier cooperation in recent years – which is moving from a focus on informal exchanges to a preference for practical projects, based on light structures, which we could best describe as ‘cooperation platforms’ rather than administrative units.

We are finding a new spirit of pragmatism, where the various actors concerned by transfrontier issues are actively searching for practical solutions to a variety of local problems which are arising from the increasing mobility of our citizens. 

There is also an important change of perception.  National boundaries are coming to be seen more and more as reservoirs of untapped potential, rather than as obstacles to cooperation.

The financial crisis is also focusing attention on the potential benefits of transfrontier cooperation, as local and regional authorities are looking to pool their resources and avoid duplication in neighbouring states, especially when it comes to expensive infrastructure projects, in areas such as health, education and emergency services.

I can tell you that the maternity hospital in my home town Izola, in Slovenia, has a practical transfrontier arrangement for pregnant women in neighbouring towns in Croatia, women from Umag or Savudrija or Poreč come to Izola’s hospital to deliver their babies.

Otherwise they would have to travel very far within Croatia to the closest Croatian hospital – and as we women know, sometimes baby just will not wait. This is a very practical example of the delivery – in more ways than one – of transfrontier public services.

That is the good news.  But the picture is not all so positive.  As these practical projects develop, they are revealing a number of significant challenges to effective transfrontier cooperation, such as:

- how to ensure that projects are sustainable,

- how to assess the added value of a project,

- identifying the most appropriate level of administration and legal structure,

- how to create a productive working environment with partners from very different institutional and administrative cultures, and

- how to create an effective knowledge base for the transfrontier territory

The differences in legal systems and administrative culture and practices are compounded by a fragmentation of our knowledge about how projects work, who is doing what, which projects are successful and why.

Some years ago, the neighbouring transfrontier regions in Slovenia, Italy and Croatia prepared a transfrontier cooperation agreement.  I am sorry to say that it was blocked by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Slovenia.  Although a great deal of cooperation continues between the regions in the three countries, this has never been formalised or truly developed to its full potential.

Our main conclusion from the report is that a sustained programme of capacity-building, training and gathering of data and information is required. We need to consolidate and pool existing expertise and develop indicators that will measure the impact of our cooperation activities.

The report goes into some detail about possible areas of action and makes a number of proposals and recommendations. I won’t list them all here, but I urge you to read it!   There are more proposals detailed in an appendix, which lists elements for a possible Congress action plan.

One of our main proposals is for the Congress to organise a conference next year of the main actors working on transfrontier cooperation issues, with a view to establishing a pool of expertise, to coordinate research and to develop a capacity-building and training programme.  The reason for this is that we are not the experts and we do not have the capacity to undertake the ambitious work that we believe to be necessary in this field.

We plan to organise this conference with the Euro Institute, who are experts in this field and I hope that many of you present here today will be able to join us in this task.

Where we see our own added value is to bring these different networks together, to better coordinate our work and to provide a political impetus to this activity.

We are confident that our proposed Action Plan will pave the way for more effective international cooperation in this field which will change the way that transfrontier cooperation is perceived at a national level and lead to a significant increase in this form of cooperation.

We plan to report back to the Congress plenary in 2017 on the implementation of this action plan.

This is a brief overview of the current and planned Congress work to meet the challenges of cooperation across borders.

I will be pleased to report back to the Governance Committee at its next meeting on the interesting case studies and experiences that I have heard during this seminar and I look forward to working with you in the future.