Plenary session of the Regional policy Committee - Final Declaration

Interregional cooperation is a valuable tool for the Regions to open up to innovative ways of thinking, responding to problems and approaching policy issues. European integration is an endless learning process and needs a strong cooperation scheme involving all sectors of society, including regional and local stakeholders. Only such a grass-roots approach to interregional cooperation, that transcends national borders and encourages improved mutual knowledge and understanding, will allow the citizens to fully experience and own Europe.

Therefore, the Assembly of European Regions:

1. Encourages all the Regions to ensure that specific priorities on Interregional Cooperation are included in their Convergence  and/or Competitiveness  programmes;

2. Calls on all Member States to fully involve Regional Authorities in the definition of the programmes and to allocate them with strong powers/competences in the planning, implementation and monitoring of the interregional projects included in the Convergence and Competitiveness programmes and in the management of Objective 3  programmes;

3. Asks the European Commission to pursue its efforts towards an ever-better application of the partnership principle in every Member State; in particular, if the Regions are to fully participate in the achievement of the Lisbon strategy, they must be granted the necessary competences;

4. Welcomes the new initiative 'Regions for Economic Change', but insist that this idea of creating a network of regions in a top-down manner should not impede the prorogation of the Interreg's bottom-up methodology;

5. Will closely monitor the development of 'Regions for Economic Change', and encourage its member Regions to use this new tool to improve coherence between their economic development strategies, the use of structural funds and the achievement of the Lisbon and Gothenburg objectives;

6. Underlines that the scope for action in the new cooperation programmes should be large enough so as to include Regions which find it hard to fully participate in the Lisbon Strategy, such as rural and isolated areas, or more generally all regions that experience strong structural difficulties;

7. Insists that the themes for cooperation should include, in particular for new EU member regions, the promotion of innovative tools for the development of sustainable, environment-friendly tourism, including e-technologies;

8. Welcomes the innovative, flexible and grass-roots approach that is adopted by interregional cooperation partners, at all levels of government;

9. Acknowledges however that experience-sharing, knowledge-transfer, cultural exchange, an improved understanding of what the EU truly stands for, and the creation of a Europe of the people are difficult objectives to quantify and assess according to short-term economic profitability standards;

10. Emphasises that these activities are essential to the future of European integration, especially in the current context of decreasing popular support for EU developments;

11. Calls for the simplification of the monitoring and control procedures of the programmes, in order to leave more time to the managing authorities and to the partners for network animation and assistance to the beneficiaries, in particular as these activities remain the primary objective of the programmes;

12. The AER commits to bring a constructive contribution to the reflection over an improved transfer of good practices into concrete policy measures at regional level;

13. The AER remains at the disposal of European, national and regional stakeholders to further discuss and to participate to the establishment of a coherent and efficient scheme for interregional cooperation within the European Union.

Strasbourg, 2nd October 2006