How does interregional cooperation benefit the regions?

News

20 August 2019

By Joint secretariat

Two people talk and laugh during an event standing next to a table with the word cooperate on it

In this second article about our unique position to shape regional policy, we’ll explore the many benefits of interregional cooperation.

We’ll see how it promotes cohesion and supports regions with their policies.

We’ll hear from our projects about how Interreg Europe and interregional cooperation brought them closer together with their European peers to help them find new solutions to their territorial challenges.

And we’ll also look at the long-term impacts.

It helps regions learn together, get inspired, and save time and money

Interreg Europe helps regions not to reinvent the wheel. We bring them together so that they can share the best way to tackle their territorial challenges.

By sharing good practices and cooperating, regions learn what others are doing, identify practices that they can adapt to their own region, and are inspired to look for new ideas to improve their policies. This helps them save time and money.

But don’t take our word for it. The Pas-de-Calais County Council team in France said ‘We consider Interreg Europe as an essential tool for local authorities all around Europe, to work on issues that they would not have had the resources to work on, build up competences, experiences and links with other EU partners.’

Listen to this inspiring story of how some regions learn together.

It puts cohesion into practice

We are the only programme that helps public authorities from across the whole of Europe.

We require our projects to form partnerships between more and less developed regions. No one is left behind. That way, we make sure to fulfil one of the main objectives of EU funds: promoting cohesion!

So far, we’ve involved 88% of Europe’s NUTS 2 regions in our projects.

According to Maria Gracia Benitez Jaramillo from the SYMBI project ‘Interregional cooperation is a powerful learning and inspiring tool that supports and helps European regions to share and discover new ways of doing. It is an essential instrument in the case of less developed and peripheral regions.’

It improves how regions implement their policies

We are a ‘capitalisation’ programme.

By getting public authorities to share and build on each other’s experiences, we help make public spending smarter, more efficient, and more targeted. Especially in Structural Funds programmes.

For every Euro we’ve invested in our projects so far, four Euros are triggered in the regions!

The ERUDITE project, for example, developed a roadmap called SEROI to see how effective a digital service could be in addressing specific needs in rural communities. This simple roadmap inspired the country of Slovenia, a project partner, to set up new Fab Labs – small scale workshops that empower individuals to create smart devises – in rural areas. These were so successful that it convinced managing authorities in Slovenia to implement national Fab Lab network financing through their 2014-2020 Operational Programme.

Learn more about how sharing solutions can lead to success or read about the services our Policy Learning Platform offers.