Policy Brief 1: Mediterranean Regions and Multilevel Governance of Culture
Iván Martín - Associate Fellow Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales (Madrid), Research Administrator College of Europe (Warsaw)
Mediterranean regions should invest in developing comprehensive territorial cultural strate-gies (consulting with lower levels of local government and civil society actors) and not limit themselves to managing activities. Interregional international cooperation projects should try to involve territorial bodies of the same level as leading partners. When this is not possible, regional bodies should be associated to the projects so that the implementation of the pro-jects at least contributes to their capacity building. Culture should be mainstreamed into ge-neral territorial development strategies at all levels and regions should be mainstreamed into the cultural policy formulation process. It would be useful to create a Network of Mediterrane-an Regions for Culture. A commission on cultural cooperation and intercultural dialogue should be created within the Euro-Mediterranean Local and Regional Assembly (ARLEM) and links established with the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue between Cultures (ALF). International cooperation projects in the Mediterranean should invest more resources in: (i) dissemination of outcomes among the general public and reaching out to civil society; and (ii) integrating best practices and experiences from previous projects into new projects. A systematic catalogue of international cultural cooperation projects in the Mediterranean and a synthetic brief of good and bad practices derived from them are necessary to ensure the valorisation of the rich experience regional authorities have accumulated in the field of inter-national cultural cooperation (very often in projects with similar characteristics). Specific Me-diterranean strategies for cultural cooperation should be developed on key themes, e.g. cul-tural heritage, artists exchange, cultural tourism as well as guide and framework for future action.
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