OECD assembled 200 specially invited guests in Bologna on 23-25 October, including Euromontana, to present the results of two years of work on rural-urban partnerships. Based on 11 case studies taken from different areas of the world, the 330-page report released on the occasion of the conference provides a conceptual framework, an analysis of different ways to organise rural-urban partnerships, with a clustering of the 11 cases into four governance models, and finally makes five recommendations on how to continue working on these partnerships. The work is rich and dense and of major interest to mountain areas. Not only does it acknowledge the fact that rural territories have an equivalent growth potential than that of urban areas, even greater in some countries. But they also provide a diversity of examples on how relationships between territories can be organised to maximise the benefit of all parties. Some of this framework could be transposed to mountain/lowland relationships.
6 December 2013
