Town Twinning Between Turkey and the EU (TWIN)
The project entitled “Town Twinning Between Turkey and the EU (TWIN)”, supported under the Instrument for Pre-Accession Assistance II (IPA-II), was launched on 6th April 2019. The Beneficiary of the Project is the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Directorate for EU Affairs (DEUA) and the three key stakeholders are the Union of Municipalities of Turkey (UMT), the Union of Provinces (UP), and the Ministry of Environment and Urbanization, Directorate-General of Local Authorities. The project aims at creating sustainable structures for exchange between local authorities in Turkey and the EU Member States, by strengthening the administrative capacity at local level in Turkey’s in EU Accession process. (Detailed information on the project is available at http://www.yereldeab.org.tr/towntwinning/.)
The Project has two components comprising “technical assistance” and “grant scheme”, with a total budget of 4.5 million Euros.
Within the scope of the project, several activities are being carried out in order to conduct town twinning/sister city activities more effectively:
- Trainings and workshops to strengthen the administrative capacity in town twinning;
- Study visits to EU Member States which have successful town twinning activities in order to see the best practices and activities in the field of town twinning;
- A web-based town twinning tool on YereldeAB Website developed to create new opportunities for cooperation and increase the number of twinning activities between the local authorities in Turkey and the EU;
- An impact assessment study for evaluation of the implementation of the EU acquis at local level;
- Organisation of an international conference to disseminate the project results.
Under the Grant Scheme component (entitled “Town Twinning Between Turkey and the EU Grant Scheme”), the implementation phase of the grant projects commenced on 21 December 2018 by contracting a grant agreement valued at approximately €2.6 million with 23 local authorities. The purpose of the Grant Scheme is to strengthen town twinning relations between the local authorities from Turkey and the EU. The grant scheme whose beneficiaries are metropolitan municipalities, provincial municipalities, district municipalities, governorates and district governorates from 19 provinces in Turkey are conducted in cooperation with co-beneficiary institutions and organisations from Germany, Bulgaria, Spain, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Portugal, Slovenia, Greece and Turkey.
Informative brochures regarding the Grant Scheme which build a common ground in thematic fields of environment, energy, fighting climate change, smart and disaster-resistant cities, recycling, sustainable tourism, youth and sports, culture, migration management and urban development are available at bit.ly/2t2ah3M
Within the framework of the Grant Scheme, among the activities undertaken by the grant beneficiaries are study visits, workshops, seminars, conferences, field visits etc for the project partner/co-beneficiary institutions and organisations. During the planning and implementation process of the aforementioned activities, grant beneficiary local authorities in Turkey recommended to their co-beneficiaries in the European Union that working in close cooperation and coordination with the respective Embassies could lead to more useful results.
In this respect, considering the importance of conducting the activities in Turkey such as study visits in a more efficient way and in a manner to contribute to Turkey-EU relations, it would be very significant to provide the co-beneficiary local administrations in EU with the necessary support when requested.
