Calls for strategic projects: a qualitative leap of transnational cooperation?
While MED has selected its first strategic projects in February 2011, new calls for proposals are open or under development as part of MED but also the CBC Programme Mediterranean Sea Basin of the European Instrument for Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument (ENPI).
With additional requirements and higher average, the projects sought to want strategic or structural, that is to say, characterized by a true leverage, ie by the ambition to lead to concrete progress on major Mediterranean. 
In this perspective, the call for proposals published on 15 March 2010 by the MED includes important innovations compared to calls for conventional projects, innovations found in more or less new calls:
- A number of narrow themes: taking into account the traditional criticism of the scattering of funds dedicated to transnational cooperation, the Member States of the MED have succeeded in agreeing on two priority themes (maritime safety on the one hand, saving energy and other renewables).
- A high-level partnership: the principle of strategic projects is to expand partnerships projects beyond the circle of stakeholders conventional projects and come to involve all stakeholders in a position of actual responsibility. The ambition is thus to obtain a commitment by States at the highest level of decision in the project.
- A work program more arrow: the call for strategic projects include the definition of work packages.
- Narrowed a list of projects with a budget: once again, to avoid the pitfall of dusting and encourage the development of projects that can "make a difference", the member states of the MED should agree on a narrow list of selected projects, each benefiting from increased financial, up to a total budget of 10 million euros (7.5 million euros of ERDF).
These new calls for projects contributing to the rise of territorial cooperation as a tool in its own territorial policies and foreign policy in the Mediterranean Union (EU). Initially created to promote cross-border approach and territorial policies European territorial cooperation has been slow to express its great potential. This latent dissatisfaction of actors of territorial cooperation, they are local, regional, national or European, could have been filled in 2007 by passing the status of the Community Initiative Objective status of full cohesion policy. However, this rise in rank does not seem to have been accompanied by substantial changes in terms of planning, monitoring and strategic governance. As stated by the CPMR in a recent working paper, "the same causes produce the same effects, the territorial cooperation programs continue in the vast majority suffer from the weaknesses of previous programming."
The publication of calls for strategic projects is built into the perspective of "upscale" territorial cooperation and the progressive recognition as integral part of European policies in the Mediterranean. This gradual integration into mainstream EU policy is clearly designed for medium to long term in the absence of true multilevel Mediterranean strategy, macro-regional type. Indeed, only a concerted determination to the Commission and Member States to coordinate their various intervention tools and support to the territories across the Mediterranean region seems likely to leave the actors of transnational cooperation in the "ghetto" in which they may feel confined. Or, "in which they perceive themselves. "(Without being confined)
For more information:
The site of the MED
The site of the CBC Programme ENPI Mediterranean
The technical note from the CPMR on cross-border cooperation
