Mercedes Bresso, President of the Committee of the Regions, has recently stated that the economic crisis might result in a slow and jobless economic recovery, undermining social cohesion. In order to avoid such an outcome and to achieve the aims of the Europe 2020 Strategy, Member States should learn from the failure of the Lisbon strategy, which was due to the fact that local authorities were not involved in its implementation.
We have talked about the forging of Territorial Pacts with Filippo Terruso, Member of the Secretariat-General within the Committee of the Regions.
Q - What is the role of the regions in Europe 2020 strategy, and which are the CoR initiatives to support regional actors in this challenge?
Europe 2020 must provide joint frameworks for policy implementation. The EU must take the competences of the various players into account, and define the levels at which each action should be carried out, within a framework of multi-level governance.
The Committee of the Regions is gaining support for its idea of forging "territorial pacts" to facilitate the implementation
of the 'Europe 2020' strategy at regional and local level. A Territorial Pact for Europe 2020 is an agreement between a country tiers of government (local, regional, national). Parties signing up to a Territorial Pact commit to coordinate and synchronize their policy agendas in order to focus their actions and financial resources on the Europe 2020 Strategy’s goals and targets.
A Territorial Pact should allow a country’s national, regional and local governments to draft and implement the Europe 2020 National Reform Programme in partnership, and to monitor its progress. To this end, a Territorial Pact should aim at:
• setting national and possibly regional targets, with recourse, when necessary, to indicators and targets other than GDP;
• implementing one or several flagship initiatives;
• identifying obstacles to the achievement of the targets at national level.
Q-Some regions such as Tuscany, Andalucia, Lazio, Piedmont, PACA and Catalonia have initiated a common path in the context of the CPMR. This process began in 2001 with the creation of the RIM (Network of Institutes of the Mediterranean) and it continued in 2007 with the development of PARM (Regional Action Plan for the Mediterranean).
The area of the Western Mediterranean is really vast and involves many different realities. The support, at this moment, of an initiative of this kind, could remove oxygen to the nascent Union for the Mediterranean. Currently, the Committee of the Regions is closely following the path of Ionio-Adriatica macro region. President Bresso has recently accepted an invitation from the President of the Istria region, Ivan Jakovčić, to meet with the Prefects of the Croatian Adriatic Counties in order to discuss the way forward for the EU strategy for the Danube region.
For further information about territorial pacts, CoR Web site
http://portal.cor.europa.eu/europe2020/news/Pages/TerritorialPacts2011.aspx
