Pavel Branda, who represents the ECR Group as well as Czech cities and municipalities in the European Union as a Member of the European Committee of the Regions, participated on 21 March in a specially organised Euronews discussion programme. The focus was on the 30th anniversary of Cohesion Policy, the aim of which is to help narrow the gap between Europe's regions. Other participants in the programme included European Commissioner Corina Creţu, Commissioners who were responsible for Cohesion Policy in the past, Antonio Tajani, the President of the European Parliament, and the Portuguese Prime Minister, António Costa.

Pavel Branda said "I was asked by the European Commission to talk briefly about our experiences with cross-border cooperation. I spoke about the transformation of our border region, which took place in my lifetime, when borders opened up that had once been almost completely closed, and the European Union began to systematically support cross-border cooperation in our Euroregion. I took examples from the environment, transport accessibility, education and projects fostering contact between people to describe how barriers in the form of borders gradually provided an opportunity to develop our region."

Mr Branda has long endeavoured to ensure that support in Brussels for communication between neighbouring regions continues and is strengthened. In the CoR he chairs the Interregional Group on Cross-Border Cooperation, and he is also Vice-President of the Association of European Border Regions, the largest European association dedicated to the development of cooperation between municipalities.

The key issue at the heart of the debate on the future of the EUs cohesion policy is currently about the continuation and degree of focus we want to put on European Territorial Cooperation, better known as Interreg. Territorial cooperation is one of the two goals of cohesion policy and provides a framework for the implementation of joint actions and policy exchanges between national, regional and local actors from different Member States. The overarching objective of European Territorial Cooperation is to promote a harmonious economic, social and territorial development of the Union as a whole. Interreg is built around three strands of cooperation: cross-border (Interreg A), transnational (Interreg B) and interregional (Interreg C).

"Territorial cooperation is crucial and this is especially the case for cross-border cooperation. More than one third of EU citizens live and work in Europe's border regions and these regions are often the least developed areas. Yet, we only dedicate less than 5% of the cohesion budget to these areas. We need a greater focus on cross-border cooperation and we need to couple this with efforts to make access to funding simpler," Mr Branda concluded.