On 19 June, a conference will be held in Brussels by the Committee of the Regions (CoR) and the European Commission on the European Grouping for Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), the new legal instrument created two years ago to facilitate cooperation experiences between EU member states’ local authorities. Established by Regulation 1082/2006, an EGTC is a cooperative grouping with legal personality. States, regional and local authorities and public entities that want to jointly organise and manage territorial cooperation actions can become members. The basic idea is to respond, through a new Community instrument, to the practical and legal obstacles which member states’ local authorities often face when they want to launch cooperation projects.

Three EGTCs have been formed till now (between France and Belgium; Hungary and Slovakia; and Spain and Portugal), all during 2008. But both in the CoR and the Commission, they believe that about 30 experiences, more or less advanced, are currently being studied.

The President of the CoR, Luc Van den Brande, is making this a priority for the next two years. Not shocking for a man who is making multilevel governance the byword of his presidency. The EGTC is part of these ‘new tools’, these ‘new models of governance’ that he calls for. Governance which exceeds the classic EU-state partnership and has different institutional levels and various nationalities working together to better respond to today’s global challenges. In this regard, the fact that a member state can be a member of an EGTC, alongside regional and local authorities, is considered as a fundamental element. The CoR has nonetheless fully invested itself in what it considers a ‘political act’ and makes it its duty to guide nascent experiences. It formed a group of 40-odd experts which closely follows developments underway and facilitates experience exchanges, is responsible for establishing a record of conventions and statutes which each EGTC must subject to (their birth certificate, of sorts) and prepare an own-initiative opinion which will be adopted in plenary session on 18-19 June.

WHAT PROJECTS?

“The tool allows a wide range of situations to be managed,” explains Gianluca Spinaci, ‘Mr EGTC’ of the CoR, “both at member level and the objective’s final endpoint”. It can first be linked to a specific cooperation project, co-funded or not by Structural Funds. The organisation of joint cross-border transport services is an example which naturally comes to mind. Among the experiences under preparation, there is also the Cerdagne hospital (west of the Pyrénées-Orientales), the first cross-border hospital in Europe which should open its doors from 2010. Located in Puigcerda, in Spain, two kilometres from the border with France, it will care for both French and Spanish patients, and in the same conditions as French hospitals for French patients. Today, it is a private foundation which is developing the project; tomorrow, an EGTC will take over. A charter of intention was signed in March 2007 by the French health minister and his Catalan counterpart. Another potential example – still at the negotiation stage – is cooperation between Romania and Bulgaria to jointly manage dredging and cleaning operations for the banks of the Danube, for which the two states have funding from the European Regional Development Fund.

An EGTC can also be designed as a tool to manage cooperation in a broader sense between several regional authorities, by gathering the different actors concerned. This is the point of view which led to the creation of the first EGTC recorded in the EU: the Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai Eurometropolis, whose goal is to strengthen links between the organisations on both sides of the Franco-Belgian border, particularly in the fields of employment, transport, land management and culture.

But above all, the instrument was originally designed to help authorities to manage territorial cooperation programmes co-funded by European Structural Funds (Objective 3). The EGTC, from this point of view, would serve as the programme’s management authority. This formula, however, seems to have some difficulty getting started. “The Commission thought it would receive more applications to this effect,” explains an expert from DG Regio. Doubtless, the fact that the regulation was adopted just before the start of the new 2007-2013 programming period – and therefore regional and local authorities did not really have the time to apply the new instrument – explains this slow take-up. In any case, even though the regulation gives the possibility to switch during the programming from a ‘classic’ type of management for cooperation programmes to the EGTC, the Commission does not expect a sudden trend for this instrument during this period. “Changing mid-way is difficult; perhaps the next programming period will be more fruitful.” An experiment, at least, should be tried: the 2007-2013 operational programme for what is called the ‘Large Region’ – covering Luxembourg, Belgium (Walloon region and the German-speaking community), France (Lorraine), and Germany (Sarre and Rhineland-Palatinate) – explicitly sets out the creation of a EGTC by 2009 which will carry out management authority activities. It will be chaired by the prefect of the Lorraine region.