Newsletter – n°27 – October 2014

Initiative worth following

After a promising first phase, led by the Diputació de Barcelona in partnership with the Moroccan Centre for Research and Development, the Local Med platform is expanding its reach and tackling new challenges in the region.

Local Med is an initiative led by the Diputació de Barcelona for the exchange and mutual learning betweenpublic and private local stakeholders of Catalonia and Morocco. In essence it is a platform for the development and systematization (the recollection, analysis and learning from local practices) of local public policies and seeks the promotion of social and regional cohesion.

In its second phase, the Local Med platform will extend its territorial reach from 24 to more than 40 local governments from the province of Barcelona and municipalities of many regions of Morocco,including large cities like Marrakech. By involving local actors from regions with different socio-economic and environmental features, this new phase looks to strengthen decentralized cooperation at the Moroccan level. As such, actors from the Tangier - Tetouan region from the first phase of the project will now collaborate with their equals in other communities.

Likewise, Local Med’s new phase aims to support relationships between actors active in development cooperation and the innovation and promotion of local governance management. The project will additionally seek to strengthen local stakeholders and contribute to a uniform development of the Mediterranean region.

The specific thematic areas of Local Med are the public policies for social cohesion, local economic development, integrated urban intervention and citizen participation. As such, many technical assistances between Catalan and Moroccan municipalities have already been launched, on topics such as ecotourism, economic development, energy efficiency or the insertion of handicapped people.

For more information please visit the Local MED website.