European Commission Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion

On October 6 the European Commission adopted the Green Paper on Territorial Cohesion, signalling the start of a major consultation with regional and local authorities, associations, NGOs, civil society and other organisations, aimed at achieving a better and shared understanding of territorial cohesion and its implications for the future of the EU's regional policy.


The goal of this debate is to come to a better and shared understanding of territorial cohesion and its implications for policy. A summary of this consultation will be published in the months following the end of the debate in February 2009.

The first discussions on territorial cohesion in the early 1990s have already been fruitful. They emphasized the importance of territorial cooperation and territorial trends, which led to the cooperation programmes (INTERREG) and the establishment of European Observatory Network on Territorial Development and Cohesion (ESPON).

This Green Paper argues that the territorial diversity of the EU is a vital asset that can contribute to the sustainable development of the EU as whole. To turn this diversity into strength, we have to address territorial cohesion through focus on new themes, new sets of relationships binding EU territories at different levels and new forms of cooperation, coordination and partnerships. These are the main issues to debate.

  • Viewing cohesion from a territorial angle calls attention to themes such as sustainable development and access to services. It also underlines that many issues do not respect administrative boundaries and may require a coordinated response from several regions or countries, while others need to be addressed at a local or neighbourhood level. Building on the experience of European territorial cooperation objective we can now look at the ways to further improve the co-operation between regions within the Union and with the neighbouring regions outside.
  • An integrated place-based approach pursued by the cohesion policy is ideally suited to respond to complex and strongly embedded issues, such as regional development but in order to maximise synergies better coordination with sectoral policies is necessary. Territorial cohesion also stresses the added value of partnership with a strong local dimension, which ensures that policies are designed and implemented with local knowledge.

A copy of the JBC submission to the consultation in available for download here:

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Pictured with European Commissioner for Regional Policy, Danuta Hubner were representatives from Dumfries and Galloway, CBI Brussels and Reg McCabe and Tom Noonan of IBEC/CBI Joint Business Council

 

IBEC
Special EU Programmes Body
EU
CBI