Kirkenes hosted European Forum on Cross-Border Cooperation

The annual forum unfolded in the High North, in the borderlands between Norway and Russia, on 6-7 November. True to the tradition of the former fora, the event was held on both sides of the Schengen border.

On the 6th November, the event participants headed to the Russian border town of Nikel where they attended a program facilitated by the Murmansk regional government and the Pechenga rayon administration. The Nikel event was part of the annual Border Cooperation Days, the annual conference focusing on relations between the border municipalities of Pechenga and Sør-Varanger.

On the 7th November, the Forum continued in Kirkenes with plenary session focusing both on Barents regional relations, as well as wider European dimensions.

- The border must never become a closed wall through which people can not travel and explore neighboring areas and visits neighbors. With mutual respect for eachother, we must continue to develop the border as a bridge between people in our countries”, Barents Secretariat leader Svensgaard underlined in her speech to the participants.

More than 150 people from 14 countries participated in the Forum. Among them where CBC practitioners, researchers, regional officials and government representatives.

- We believe that this is an excellent opportunity for us to show to other European countries and other border regions the good and well-functioning cross-border relations which exist here in the north,” Svensgaard said during the event.

- Cross-border cooperation connects people, local authorities and civil societies on both sides of the border,” she stressed, adding that ”people-to-people cooperation is the most important dimension in what are doing.”

The Forum on CBC in a Wider Europe has been organized annually since 2010, first in the Slovak-Ukrainian borderlands, later in Elblag-Kaliningrad (Poland-Russia), Moldova and Joensuu-Sortavala (Finland-Russia). The Czech-based Institute of Stability and Development has been instrumental in the organization of all the five fora.

The annual award for contributions to CBC was this year given to Irina Neganova from Nikel and Harald Sørensen from Kirkenes. The former has over a great number of years contributed to cooperation and facilitated traveling across the Norwegian-Russian border. Harald Sørensen worked extensively with cross-border relations within the fields of culture, sports and business since the early 1990s.

The event program, list of participants, as well as speakers’ presentations are available underneath.