Newsletter – n°36 – September 2015

News from the Secretariat

The UN summit on Sustainable Development Goals and the preparations for the forthcoming COP 21 summit have put development cooperation and decentralised cooperation on the agenda these past weeks. Including future funding for both.

Obviously in this field future funding means future EU budgets, and this coincided with the traditional “EU budget season”: summer and autumn are the seasons when European institutions adopt their respective position on the following year’s EU budget, and this is why PLATFORMA was active on this issue.

PLATFORMA secretariat contacted topical decision-makers in both the European Commission and the European Parliament to ensure that they will defend the “Local authorities in development” budget line for 2016.

These efforts were needed as last July, the Council proposed to cut that specific budget line (- €8,000,000 in commitments; - €4,000,000 in payments). Our main arguments were that this would not make sense when the European Union, Member States, the United Nations and the international community as a whole, consistently recognise that local solutions and initiatives are more effective to tackle global issues. Through decentralised cooperation Europe’s local and regional governments deliver efficient, long-term solutions to today’s and tomorrow’s global issues such as climate change, the refugee crisis, widespread inequalities, etc.

Furthermore, at a time of increasing Euroscepticism and growing disenchantment with national politics, decentralised cooperation has the potential to mobilise European citizens in their town or region. The EU budget support to their work is a low-cost way to show them concrete results of the European Union policies for development. We were supported in this by DG DEVCO of the European Commission as well as by the European Parliament. Furthermore, in his State of the Union address the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker clearly stressed the need for Europe to invest more in development cooperation.

Our next newsletter will inform you of the outcome of our efforts to secure appropriate funding for Europe’s towns’ and regions’ action in development cooperation.

For further information, please contact Marine Gaudron.