Coordinating and Programming Cross-border and Trans-national Partnerships in Mediterranean and South-East Europe Areas through Stakeholder and Benchmarking Analysis
Problems addressed
• Scarse coordination and programming of transnational and cross-border partnerships of EU regions with partners in the South Mediterranean shore and South-East Europe (neighbouring partners) and with external EU policies (MEDA, CARDS and future Neighbourhood instrument) 
Objectives
• Identification of procedures to enhance the Regions’ role in the Interreg strategic programming (that is, participation in the elaboration of Interreg Complements);
• Identification of coordination measures within Interreg and wth MEDA and CARDS programmes as well as with the incoming Neighbourhood Programme
•  Development of the partnership concept, taking into account the diverse vertical and horizontal subsidiarity structures in South Mediterranean and South-East Europe Countries
Approach and methodology
• Development of the parntership concept (Regions’ role in multilevel/multilayer programming and coordination), considering both the EU policies (internal social cohesion and external policies – MEDA, CARDS and Neighbourhood Programmes) and Third Countries institutional contexts (vertical and horizontal subsidiarity ptinciple application). This will be realized through a policy and institional stakeholder analysis.
• Identification, analysis and transfer of good practices on programming and coordination in Interreg programme, strand A and B. The analysis will be carried out through the creation of a benchmark instrument, that will be applied on the selecter Interreg projects. The benchmarking instrument can be very useful for the INTERACT programme: it could be replicated on a broader scale to compare Interreg practices on partnership. In this sense the COMPART project will involve theInteract point tool box.in the elaboration of the benchmarking instrument.
