Esslingen am Neckar, 23 to 25 October 2017. The first regional conference on Municipal Partnerships with Eastern Europe took place in autumn 2017. Around 90 delegates from German and Eastern European municipalities accepted the invitation issued by the Service Agency Communities in One World and came to Esslingen am Neckar. They included some 20 actors from Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Belarus, the Republic of Moldova and Macedonia. The three-day conference focused on strengthening municipal partnerships and mainstreaming the 2030 Agenda at the local level.
The conference was opened by the Mayor of Esslingen, Dr Markus Raab. Like Ulrich Kaltenbach, Deputy Head of Division, Federal states; local authorities; development education; German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), in his welcome address he pointed to the key importance of municipalities in the development process, as captured by the slogan 'Act locally, impact globally'.
Following a brief input by Kurt-Michael Baudach, Department Head at the Service Agency, on municipal development cooperation and the Service Agency's areas of activity, in the afternoon participants were invited to attend a panel debate. This provided an opportunity to discuss aspects of municipal partnerships with Eastern Europe in depth. The discussion was based on a presentation by Natasha Ilijeva Acevska, an expert on municipalities. She spoke about the challenges of sustainable development in Eastern European municipalities such as decentralisation, energy efficiency and solid waste management. At the same time she emphasised that municipal partnerships are suitable arrangements for making an important contribution towards successfully tackling these issues, as they are able to develop and implement concrete solutions to problems.
To also make the conference topics more tangible and enable participants to see things for themselves, on the morning of day two of the conference participants were invited to join an excursion to the SiNN Working Area Improvement District project and the 'intelligent' new building of Südwestmetall (the Baden-Württemberg Employers' Association of the Metal and Electrical Industry). The tour of the new administrative building provided participants amongst other things with a practical example of energy-efficient construction.
In the afternoon participants were invited to join bilingual workshops in order to engage in depth with the topics of the 2030 Agenda, civic participation, social media tools for municipalities and innovative instruments for planning the future of a municipality. Day two of the conference closed on a high, with a very personal speech delivered by the Mayor of Esslingen, Dr Jürgen Ziegler. Cultural inputs were provided by the group 'Talaka' from Maladzyechna - a partner municipality of Esslingen - who performed traditional songs from Belarus, and the Klezmer Quartet from Heidelberg, who played some acoustic dance music. At the same time this gave participants an opportunity to socialise informally, and strike up new networks.
The final day of the conference was devoted to the various forms of support available to both municipal and civil society actors. Following a comprehensive presentation by the Service Agency of the instruments for human resource and financial support, participants were then able to obtain advice on other forms of support available at a market of opportunities.
In the course of the conference the Eastern European participants took the opportunity to hold working meetings in their respective German partner municipalities in order to discuss in context specific details of the future design of their partnerships.
All in all the conference was a successful kick-off event for further conferences with this regional focus. The next conference on Eastern Europe is planned for 2020.
