Sharing borders, groving closer.

On 21 September, European Cooperation will be celebrated all over Europe and in the neighbouring countries. Almost 40 countries will come together to celebrate cooperation and bridge-building between local communities across borders. Public events will take place during the week of 17th -23rd September all over Europe.

Since the beginning of the 1990s more than 20 000 projects, co-funded by the EU, have contributed to improving the lives of European citizens across borders, from creating jobs to protecting the environment to improving health care services, transport and energy.





The idea of the European Cooperation Day is to make this work done more visible.

The Karelia ENPI CBC programme is also participating to the day. The programme itself will presented at the University of Oulu on 21st September and at the International Innovation Forum in St Petersburg on following week. Several projects will open their doors for the public during the week and tell about their work.

You can read more of the European Cooperation Day from www.ecday.eu and find the list of the projects' activities from our website.


Henna-Mari Helenius
Programme Coordinator

«Eco-efficient tourism» project develops tourist sites along the Blue Highway

«Eco-efficient tourism» project is being implemented in the framework of the Karelia ENPI CBC Programme. It is aimed at making Euregio Karelia more attractive for tourists through gradual leveling of the quality of services provided to tourists on the two sides of the border. That also includes introduction of eco-efficient technologies for management of recreational areas and improving the quality of services offered in active tourism destinations in Republic of Karelia (Lake Ladoga and Syamozero areas) in co-operation with adjacent Finnish areas. The project will contribute to making pilot areas more comfortable, safe, environmentally friendly and known for these features. It will also significantly improve cross-border tourism transboundary practices and regional development co-operation. The partner consortium headed by non-profit partnership «Centre for Problems of the North, Arctic and Cross-border Cooperation» unites a number of partners. The Russian partners are Karelian Research Centre of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Energy Efficiency Centre, Petrozavodsk Municipal Utility College, Pryazha and Sortavala Municipal District Administrations. The Finnish partners are represented by Ecofoster Group Oy, Finnish Environment Institute (Joensuu office), Centre for Economic Development, Transport and the Environment for North Karelia, Metsähallitus (Natural Heritage Services, South Finland/North Karelia), Ilomantsi Municipality and an associate partner - Karelia Expert.

Seminar «Strategies and best practices for sustainable/ green development of cities and regions» that was held in Petrozavodsk on June 13-15, 2012 officially launched the Project: the first half of June 13 was given to the working kick-off meeting, where plans for the project implementation were discussed.

Pryazha and Sortavala Municipal Districts became a place for an «Eco-efficient tourism» project expedition that took place on July, 16–17th, 2012. The main goal of an expedition was to explore the area and find most suitable places for the introduction of eco-efficient technologies for recreational area management and the improvement of quality of services offered in active tourism destinations in the Republic of Karelia.

The expedition was specifically aimed at gathering information about the situation in the districts for further selection of pilot areas, that will be facilitated as long-stay recreation areas on the shores of Ladoga and Syamozero lakes and short-stay (from a few minutes to a few hours) stopover sites along the "Blue Highway" route.

The expert team visited more than 20 potential places. In several weeks the experts will choose several pilot areas for further development according to data dealing with issues of property, land acquisition, accessibility, recreational appeal, their popularity among tourists, amount of investments needed, etc. Later, special management models for maintenance of the installed equipment will be elaborated. They will consider interests of local people and tourists, envisage joint responsibility of local administration and businessmen for waste disposal, energy and water supply of chosen territories.

According to the Leader of the Project, the director of „North-Centre“ Igor Shevchuk, in spite of the fact that the Project envisages facilitation of only 2 long-stay areas and several short-stay stopovers, the infrastructure development itself as well as comfort improvement and favorable atmosphere for people has a great significance. It has a certain influence on creating positive image of the Republic of Karelia in tourists' minds and on destination options for tourists. Local people will get more comfortable and sustainable environment in recreation areas, get rid of dumps in these areas, have new opportunities for the development of small business.

The development of caravanning can be considered as one of the most prospective tourism spheres. Nowadays it is one of the most popular kinds of auto tourism in Europe and the US. According to World Tourism Organization, caravanning amounts to 17% of all tourists. According to the representative of „KarelCaravanService“ Konstantin Ekhov, who took part in the expedition, auto tourism in Russia is underdeveloped not only because of rough roads, but also because of the absence of well equipped sites and roadside infrastructure. Though the Project doesn't envisage this scale of investments, the plans for facilitation of chosen areas will provide the opportunities for creation of caravan parking sites and adequate infrastructure. The fact that the Project attracts the attention of potential investors to the issue of caravanning development is a positive factor.

The participants of the Project have a positive perception of the Project's perspectives and believe that the implementation of planned activities and events will make Karelia more attractive for tourists and will contribute to the creation of favorable and comfortable life for local people.

Elena Cherniakevich, project manager

Contracting of the Tourism projects

The contracting process of projects that were awarded a grant from the Tourism Cooperation call has been finished successfully and almost all projects are up and running. I am quite happy with how most of the contract negotiations went, and despite some difficult issues that were encountered along the way, there was always willingness on both sides to find a quick and simple solution that enabled the negotiations to proceed. This promises well for the implementation of the projects and should the same energy, perseverance and determination be put into the projects in the future, they will certainly all succeed and produce lasting results for the years to come.

I am sure that the contracting process has been a learning experience for everyone. The basic idea of the contracting process from our side is to remove ineligible costs from the budget, as all the successful applicants know by now. I will not repeat the criteria that are used to make an eligibility assessment here – those who are interested can look them up in the Programme Manual and the Guidelines for the Calls for Proposals – but in general most ineligible costs seemed to be related to activities that did not support or advance the objectives of the project at all. However, surprisingly many of these cases turned out to be misunderstandings, mostly because the description of the activity was not sufficiently detailed or the term used for the activity was misleading. While these issues were transient in nature and easy to fix, it does take a lot of time to try to clear up what is really meant by a description or term. This is a valuable lesson for all of us, because such issues needlessly prolong the contracting process and they could easily be avoided by paying more attention on how activities are described in the application.

The Tourism Cooperation projects will have their next seminar in December. It will be interesting to see how the tourism portfolio of our Programme is progressing and what kind of results we can expect from it. Considering the promising atmosphere of cooperation that we had in Joensuu last February, I am sure we all have high hopes and expectations of the tourism projects.

See you all in December!

Toni Saranpää

Programme Coordinator

Checklists and magnifying glasses

The common vision of Financial Unit´s work may be persons sitting in chambers with magnifying glasses and eagerly looking for errors and mistakes. That view is quite true except we have no magnifying glasses and we aren´t happy to find ineligible expenditures or anything negative. Financing controllers are not against persons working on projects. We are working on ENPI CBC programme where the second C stands for cooperation. That´s what we want to do – co-operate. Our main goal is to help you to implement your project efficiently and legally. By helping project´s to obey the programme rules the major harms in future can be avoided. 

First call projects have proceeded well. Five of them have received their first interim payment orders. Auditing process is new for everyone. There has been some confusion of how accurate expenditure verification process must be. Auditing work in ENPI programmes differs from traditional auditing process. Checking process must extend also to contents of projects and auditors e.g. have to evaluate whether expenditures have incurred by project.

For us working in JMA´s financial unit the checklists are one of the most important tools. You may wonder the meaning of checklists but hopefully have found them useful. There are several details to take into account when drawing up payment request and financial report. It is desirable that checklists will help both Lead Partners and Auditors to make sure that all necessary information has been gathered and taken into consideration when drawing up reports to JMA.

There is lots of space for comments in checklists.  However use of comments is uncommon. It would be illuminating if here and there was something written down. It doesn´t need to be negative but comments can be something that confirms things are going the way they are supposed to. We want to challenge to use comment field boldly.

Programme has been started quite calmly and we have had an opportunity to polish off the report model during the spring. We hope you find financial report easy to fill and will contact us if any questions appear.

Jarkko Kärkimaa

EU Financing Controller

Summer!

We are taking a break from cross-border cooperation and will be back in August.

Wishing you a good and relaxing summer!

On Contracting and Life

The contracting of Tourism Cooperation projects is nearly finished and most projects are up and running. On the whole, this process has been interesting and engaging. As one can expect, various problems and issues have risen along the way, but most of them have been solved smoothly and swiftly. This experience can and will be utilized in making future contracting processes more efficient and rapid, which is of utmost importance since the Programming period is getting shorter day by day. My next contract negotiations will begin in the fall and they should progress with better pace than the previous ones. 

Meanwhile, as my first round of contracting is almost over, I thought this would be a good opportunity to look back and reflect on the differences I have so far encountered between the ENPI CBC Programme and other funding programmes. Having moved to Karelia ENPI from a position in which I worked with the ERDF (European Regional Development Fund) and a few national development Programmes, I can safely say that there are clear differences between them. For example, decision-making processes are very different, as is the contract-based funding system, which does not exist in ERDF or national programmes. The role of the JMA is also very different, not to say anything about my role as programme coordinator. My title in ERDF was the same, but my tasks and duties could not possibly be more different: in ERDF coordinators receive applications as soon as they come in and are in charge of starting the preparation and decision-making processes. In ENPI we receive the applications when they have already been accepted for funding, and my job is to manage the contracting process and negotiate with the applicants. 

ENPI differs from ERDF also in terms of individual projects and their objectives. The bulk of ERDF projects is thematically fragmented, meaning that no two projects usually aim at the same objectives or address the same general problem in any complementary manner. This makes it very difficult to assess their overall impact and it can be said to be a somewhat inefficient approach in general. Karelia ENPI, on the other hand, makes use of thematic calls, which creates a kind of portfolio of projects that operate under the same theme – tourism, for example. While this approach does not necessarily help in assessing the impact of individual projects, it does allow better assessment of the impact of the whole Programme. 

ENPI and ERDF are also governed by different laws and regulations, both on the EC and national levels. This obviously means that the rules are also slightly different. Laws and regulations concerning both Programmes are clear enough but this does not mean that the instructions derived from them are equally simple. The instructions in Karelia ENPI are extremely good and clear compared to ERDF. The Programme Manual and Guidelines to calls are extensive but not off-putting, and they cover more or less every aspect that applicants need to know about applying and implementation. ERDF includes a fairly large number of rules that are not transparent because they exist only in memos that pass between different organizations. As the Karelia ENPI has only one organization that is responsible for the management of the Programme, it is easier to keep the instructions updated and simple.

-         Toni Saranpää

Programme Coordinator