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Editorial - CENTROPE accelerates
With the upcoming Győr summit meeting, the political project CENTROPE will soon be taken a step further. At the same time and as a result of CENTROPE Capacity activities, the contours of the cross-border cooperation agenda for the coming years become increasingly clear.
On 5 May 2011, the political heads of the regions and cities that make up the Central European Region will meet in Győr, Hungary, to their first summit meeting since 2007 and start a regular coordination process which will see such gatherings on a semi-annual basis. Against the background of the fall of the last barriers for full labour market mobility in CENTROPE, the summit will be dedicated to the steps necessary to make the most for the citizens of this newly emerging ‘Region without Limits’. The Political Board meeting will be accompanied by a public conference under attendance of the politicians, which will include high-evel panel debates on the perspectives of deepened CENTROPE integration in the current economic situation. Stakeholders of the Central European Region and the entire interested public are welcome to participate and registration has already started.
This edition of our newsletter sheds light on some topical developments and focus areas of the CENTROPE Capacity project, all of which decisive for the shape of the upcoming cooperation agenda. A key pilot activity started right now is the Infrastructure Needs Assessment process which is to lay the groundwork for more comprehensive and multilaterally coordinated development of infrastructures, like road and rail links across the region. Already at the stage of first results is the CENTROPE Regional Development Report, a monitoring system that allows for regular overviews of major economic trends in CENTROPE and its partner regions, to be presented on the occassion of the Győr summit. The emergence of CENTROPE as a cross-border knowledge region could get a major boost through intensified cooperation in the field of life sciences, where enormous potentials exist in the region at large – a conclusion drawn at a thematic development workshop hold in February in Vienna. That this is no empty talk and highly competitive biotechnologies from the region are aready applied by innovative businesses, is exemplified by a green-tech company that successfully turns biomass into energy and thereby grows within and through CENTROPE. The same can be said about the educational cooperation among schools and school boards in the region, which matured over more than a decade and most currently came up with a sophisticated competence model for curricula that foster multilingualism and other skills for the future of young Centropeans. And finally, turning from the long run to the short shot, readers should be aware that in the first weeks of May CENTROPE will become the centre of the ice hockey universe, with major parts of the World Championship to be held in Bratislava – and teams from the CENTROPE countries hotly tipped to carry home the trophy.
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