Project Background
The project starts off from the need of municipalities - small and medium-sized in particular - to gear up their town twinning relations to the challenges posed by the an active participation of their communities in the European integration process. Even the small local authorities nowadays see the importance of re-interpreting town twinning relationships in a more strategic way oriented towards the exchanges of best practices in several policy areas through benchmarking and the development of innovative local policy as a result of “contamination” with policy outcomes developed in other EU countries.
The main aspect that stands at the core of this project is the fact that a more ambitious development of town twinning relations through a thematic network. The thematic network however requires more efforts especially for medium sized and small municipalities, enhanced skills among the civil servants at local and regional level and the development of tools supporting them in the management of their projects once approved.
As a result of the experience matured among the members of the Network and the support measure project carried out in 2009 by SERN this appears as a partial answer to the needs of the local and regional authorities.
The analysis carried out on the 9 project proposal emerged from the training projects indicate that what is required not only good planning skills and drafting abilities when writing a thematic network application, there is a substantial need of tools that allow the applicant and its partners to monitor effectively their project, to ensure high quality in its implementation and above all the actual achievement of the objectives set out in the planning phase. Often the difference between the proposal and final outputs and results is substantial.