Med Pact

The Project Coordinator together with members of the Scientific Committee visited Sin El Fil October 12-15th 2009 and Marrakesh on December 1-4 in order to plan for the last stretch of activities ..

GUIFORMED

GUIFORMED project (GATAB, Turkey) has been struggling with the process of data collection from its partners in Germany, Greece, Tunisia Lebanon and Turkey..

SHAMS

SHAMS has completed most of its planned activities in Tunisia and Morocco and is planning to finish its activities in Bosra – Syria by June 2010 ...

APUDUI

APUDUI is continuing its remarkable work in assisting the Urban Community of Annaba in Algeria in establishing an urban planning and development agency ...

PAMLED is in the process of finalizing the last part of its work packages aiming at the operationalization of the pilot projects that were identified for Bodrum – Turkey, Marrakesh – Morocco and Sin El Fil Lebanon. The Project Coordinator together with members of the Scientific Committee visited Sin El Fil October 12-15th 2009 and Marrakesh on December 1-4 in order to plan for the last stretch of activities.

Bodrum will be implementing two pilot projects for implementing an “Environmental Awareness Action Plan for Bodrum” as well as a “Pre-feasibility Study on Cultural Heritage and Archaeological Tourism”. The City Council agreed to fund the pilot project on cultural heritage from its own funds. Sin El Fil will be implementing a project aiming at “Promoting and Enhancing the Competitively of Young Entrepreneurs in Sin El Fil” through PAMLED’s assistance but also a significant leverage of resources through public-private partnerships with trade unions and private sector enterprises in Sin El Fil and the surroundings. Marrakesh from its side will engage in a project on “Environmental Education on Water Consumption” in specific suburbs of the historical Medina as part of the global efforts of Marrakesh in pursuing the Green Label for the old Medina.

PAMLED held its third transnational meeting in Bodrum – Turkey on February 24-26, 2009 in the presence of all project partners and associates. The meeting constituted a privileged occasion to discuss the pilot projects that were developed in 2008 (and during which PAMLED did not organize a transnational meeting).
PAMLED managed to develop for each of the pilot projects listed below a detailed project identification template and contacts are underway to secure funding for these pilot projects.

The Municipality of Bodrum developed two proposals: “Environmental Awareness Action Plan” and “Pre-feasibility Study on Cultural Heritage and Archaeological Tourism”. During the third meeting, the Mayor of Bodrum committed to fund the Cultural Heritage proposal from the City’s own resources and the collaboration with the Municipality of Luca (Italy) will continue around the environmental awareness action plan.
The Municipality of Sin El Fil had to change its initial idea for a business incubator for youth in tourism related jobs - which turned out to be too ambitious for the means available in the current context of PAMLED especially at the level of the Municipality of Sin El Fil itself - to a youth entrepreneurship project (based on a model applied in Prato through its Observatory on Youth Policies). The new project will mobilize resources from local entrepreneurs based in Sin El Fil to fund innovative ideas presented by the youth through a competition which will be organized by the Municipality.
The Municipality of Marrakesh has engaged in a project on “Environmental Education on Water Consumption” in specific suburbs of the historical Medina as part of the global efforts of Marrakesh in pursuing the ISO 14000 certification.

In addition to the review of the progress achieved on the pilot projects front, the transnational meeting dedicated a significant amount of time for discussing city to city partnerships in plenary and in working groups, where cities presented their successes and challenges in a very open and straight-forward style, avoiding the promotional “clichés” that are normally presented in this type of meetings and were particularly keen on sharing and learning from the experience of the other cities present in the meeting.

From Pilot Activities to Sustainable Local Development: some lessons learned from the MED-PACT experience During the Transnational meeting of PAMLED in Bodrum (February 2009), the Team Leader of the Technical Assistance to the Beneficiaries of MED-PACT Mr. Ziad Moussa shared with the group some insights about the transition from a pilot project stage (output) to a sustainable change in behavior (outcomes) and which can ultimately lead to a lasting impact towards the achievement of the MED-PACT goals. According to Mr. Moussa, the following factors need to be taken into consideration:

Local ownership: The identification of pilot projects in a participatory manner which involves all concerned stakeholders is by itself a very important outcome in decentralized cooperation projects such as MED-PACT. However, it is very important to ensure that these projects are “owned” by the communities who identified them (i.e: the project setup is concrete enough and responds to real-felt needs expressed by the stakeholders, its scale is realistic enough to ensure that it can be executed with the local means at hand, its results can be felt/seen within a reasonable timeframe, etc…)
The importance of building local capacities: Northern partners might have all the required skills to develop a complete proposal for a pilot project and can even execute this project should funding become available. However without a proper investment in building local capacity the sustainability of the whole effort runs the risk of being jeopardized once the external funding stops
The importance of mobilizing and committing local resources: Southern partners often conceive decentralized cooperation as a one way exchange of capacities and resources which is definitely not the case, as there should be an equitable exchange of resources within a partnership. A pilot project would hence have much stronger chances of being implemented if the local partners commit their own resources to it, no matter how modest these resources are. Sometimes it might be too easy to assume that the administrative momentum at the local partners’ institutions is too heavy and non-conducive, however the MED-PACT experience in different countries and in different thematic contexts has proven that a lot can be done in this regard.
The importance of mainstreaming pilot projects within the broader policy context at the city, regional and governmental levels: a pilot project runs the risk of remaining an isolated one-time initiative or event if it fails to influence/catalyze/inspire the broader policy context. In MEDA countries in particular, influence at the national level might be difficult to achieve yet the local and regional contexts are increasingly open and receptive to the participatory governance processes promoted by projects such as GEMM and MED-PACT constitute a privileged target for achieving policy influence

The PAMLED project (Building effective Partnerships among European and Mediterranean Municipalities for Local Economic Development) has completed the identification of the pilot projects in each of the 3 MEDA Cities Marrakesh (Morocco), Bodrum (Turkey) and Sin El Fil (Lebanon). All three pilot projects are designed along the sustainable tourism and environment theme and range from providing an eco-label to the ancient Medina is Marrakesh to the establishing an incubator for tourism-oriented SME’s in Sin El Fil.

An interesting is the special attention given to mainstreaming the findings and recommendations of the pilot projects into the municipal legislation of the concerned cities. Promising linkages were also established with a number of Italian and international donors working in these cities by the Municipality of Prato (Italy) who is leading the project to provide funding for their upscaling and execution.

Activities of the PAMLED project (Prato, Italy) are unfolding smoothly as planned in the initial project document.
The PAMLED Partners entered in September 2007 the second phase of the project which envisages the constitution of the two thematic working groups to support all the 8 partners in networking more efficiently, while establishing the methodological process of the city-to-city partnerships that intends to implement the Pilot Project Plans in the three Mediterranean territories (Sin El Fil, Marrakech and Bodrum).
The project website is under construction and the address will be communicated soon.

PAMLED