TNC Planning
Preparing a cooperation project
Finding transnational partners
What you have already done at this stage:
- Your local stakeholders are aware that cooperation will bring some added value to the local strategy;
- You have defined a cooperation strategy;
- You have identified your priority cooperation idea(s); and
- You have already mobilised local actors around the cooperation idea(s).
Identify the “good” partner and partnership
Searching for a partner is not a question of chance. You should define the partner profile using specific selection criteria. These should include the expectations and the type of expertise and knowledge that you are looking for. Criteria might include:
- Similarities in terms of characteristics and challenges of the area - physical (coast, mountains…), historical (built heritage,…), socio-economic (predominance of small industries, …), cultural (music, language, identity...) characteristics;
- Complementarities of know-how, experience;
- Geographical location: proximity of territories (cross-border);
- Existence of an ongoing partnership set up by a local actor; and/or
- Language and other communications issues
You should think about the size of partnership and consider how many partners are you looking for? The answer depends on the objectives of your cooperation project. Some projects may need a large partnership to be pertinent. For others, a partnership between three or four areas may be ideal.
A balance needs to be found to ensure that project partnerships are sufficiently sized to be dynamic and provide added value. However, needs to be taken to avoid unduly complex partnerships, where mutual understanding may be hard to achieve.
