Description (EN): The local public administration is a highly regulated field, with a pre-defined set of services which need to be provided to the communities at a certain degree of quality. Nevertheless, within the governance system, the local administration enjoys a certain level of autonomy, the relevant actors having the possibility to design and organize their activity within the general framework (regulatory and financial) imposed at national level. Using this autonomy, five municipalities from Romania and Hungary (Alesd, Sinteu, Marghita from Romania, and Szarvas, Berettyoujfalu from Hungary) decided to continue and increase the intensity of their previous cooperations in order to improve the quality of the public services they provide to their communities. These efforts will build on the competitive advantage represented by the cross-border environment which allows a cross-fertilization process in between the solutions and procedures applied on the two sides of the border.The partner institutions are small and medium sized municipalities, sharing similar needs and challenges. While larger urban agglomerations are performing well economically, the smaller urban and rural areas are experiencing difficulties in attracting and maintaining a vivid economic activity, which in turn can sustain the social and cultural life of the local communities. Moreover, their capacity to develop and implement innovative solutions is limited by the scarcity of resources the municipalities are facing. Thus, one possibility to support the improvement of the quality of the public services they are providing is to establish cooperation mechanisms which shall facilitate the process of putting together their available resources and thus to increase their capacity for innovation.During the project development process, the partner insitutions identified those fields and topics of interest which they would like to focus upon during project implementation. These were choosen in such a manner that all of the selected topics are reflecting the needs of the involved partners. These topics are: the management of the local public budget, the policies which promote the modern communication technologies, the improvement of data management capacity, the increase of transparency of the public administration activities and the promotion of participatory processes in decision making.In their efforts to find better solutions in these fields, the partners started from the fact that globalization and digitalization represent some of the main characteristics of the modern-day world, where information is generated and processed fast and precisely. Hence, the digital agenda is a driving direction of the modern administrations, therefore one of the main direction in project implementation will be the identification of IT solutions which fit the needs of small and medium communities.The representative democracy is the basic form of governance all-around Europe. In the fast-changing modern world, it became more and more difficult to identify solutions to the ever-more complicated and diverse problems which affect the life of the communities. The involvement of the local population in the decision making process is thus increasingly important, since the solutions must be validated on community level in order to ensure their acceptance and successful implementation. And while the communication channels evolved and offer extraordinary opportunities for digital consultations of the large audience, the participatory processes are still based on direct, physical presence especially in the rural areas. The project is therefore aiming at developing instruments which shall facilitate the access of the local communities to modern communication tools, and to encourage the participation in the decision making processes. As part of thee efforts, the project also includes activities which shall increase the awareness of the local represenAs part of the project approach, the partners will jointly analyze the state-of-the-art in the topics addressed. The analysis will involve knowledge available outside the partnership as well, which will be collected through comprehensive studies on different subjects. Based on this analysis, the partners will test new processes and procedures to reduce the administrative burden for people, enterprises and other organizations, especially by aplying modern IT solutions. The testing will take into consideration the suggestions coming from the partners from the other side of the border, contributing to the harmonization of the local public administration services. This will contribute to the development of the capacities of the local administrations which will be able to provide services of similar quality on both sides of the border. Therefore, the project will create the administrative support which can stimulate the cross-border cooperation in various fields of activity.By the proposed objectives and activities, the project fits with the Investment Priority 11/b and the related thematic objective, having as final goal to enhance the joint institutional capacity for providing better services in the cross-border area.
Read more Achievements (EN): Achieved:
1) A joint strategy serving the improvement of cross-border cooperation, which serves as a basis of collaboration between smaller localities from Romania and Hungary
2) Better servicies for population in case of emergency through a functional SMS messaging system for Sinteu Commune, which allow rapid interaction with the population in case of emergency situations and also the communication of important information related to the community's life.
3) Improved safety of the population through a functional surveillance system for supervising roads within the commune of Sinteu,
4) Better access to information related to community life and increased transparency for the citizens of municipality of Szarvas to
5) Improved conditions for participatory governance in the new refurbished meeting room in Berettyoujfalu City Hall.
Finalized:
1) 10 Cross-border meetings organized for the institutions involved in the project with the aim of changing experience and adopting models of good practices on cross-border level.;
2) 1 Joint strategy for strengthening the cross-border cooperation among smaller municipalities from Romania and Hungary;
3) 1 SMS messaging system was developed,a system of sending SMS messages to the population which allow rapid interaction with the population in case of emergency situation and fast communication of important information related to the community's life;
4) 1 Surveillance system was configured and put into operation, increasing the feeling of security of the local population;
5) 1 Study on the use of IT tools as instruments for improving the data management in the local public administration;
6) 1 Software developed for increasing the data processing capacity ;
7) 1 Digital education program was organized for people over 50 years, consisting of two courses focus on learning to use IT equipments (laptops, printers) ;
8) 1 Refurbished meeting room in Berettyoujfalu City Hall;
9) 1 Multilingual website developed in three languages - Hungarian, Romanian and English, which will allow public consultations.
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Expected Outputs (EN): The main result is represented by the cross-border cooperation mechanism established by the project with the goal of intensifying and harmonizing the quality of public services provided by the small and medium municipalities from the border area. The intense exchange of experience and transfer of knowledge supported by the project activities will create professional linkages among the partner institutions. The high number and frequency of workshops and meetings (10 meetings in 15 months, with additional 2 joint informal local council meetings), will generate a solid platform of communication on technical level among the participants.
The exchange of experience is generally regarded as being a soft measure where the good practices are presented and acknowledged by the participants.An example of good practice is most of the time inspiring, but its implementation in a different environment is imposing challenges which are (unfortunately quite often) blocking its realization. The adaptation to the specific circumstances is difficult, especially when the details of its implementation in the original location are not available. The cross-border cooperation mechanism proposed within this project is making a step further in the transfer of best practices by initiating a learning process with the participation of all partners.
The learning process determines the active participation of the partners in the preparation and evaluation of the experimental part of the exchange of experience, strengthening the accumulation of knowledge both for the experimenting partner and for the partners supporting the pilot actions. Moreover, the continuous contacts are considerably increasing the chances that the actions tested by the participants will be successfully implemented. Hence, the practical element of the project will have an essential contribution to the achievement of the objective of harmonizing the performances of the public administrations from the two sides of the border.
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