The goal of the visit of exchange was to acknowledge and analyze European multi-level tools and public policies that have demonstrated to be effective in fostering economic development at EU's regional level, with a focus on assessing the specific experiences in the following

• multi-level management and public-private institutionalization of cross-border territories;
• multitasking within territorial development projects;
• policies on innovation and production;
• policies on agricultural transition with a urban-suburban and rural basis.

The result was a fruitful sharing of ideas, approaches, experiences and best practices that may help build skills to design methodologies and consolidate territorial policies.

The agenda included a first step in Brussels where the delegation met the European Commission representatives of Andalucía and Asturias regions, of the Committee of the Regions, as well as the head of the sector Regional Programmes of Latin America, Marc Litvine, and the programme manager of EUROsociALII, Paz Velazco Velazquez.

Following, the delegates headed for Italy, where they encountered relevant regional institutions in pilot territories engaged in

• cross-border cooperation - Gorizia-Nova Gorica;
• national and regional government institutions - primarily the DG Programming, the regions of Friuli Venezia Giulia, Emilia Romagna, Lazio and Sardegna;
• and public and public-private innovative institutions in charge of defining and applying national policies on agricultural and industrial development.

The visit of exchange is now a tradition of EUROsociAL, a key methodology for consolidating the liaison between Europe and Latin America. This concept is particularly relevant in the case of decentralization, regional development and social cohesion, provided that “recipes” that can be automatically replicated do not actually exist.

In this regard, Europe can count on a wealth of experiences, which have led to collect methods, approaches, policies, strategic perspectives, programmes and practices, thus generating best practices and solutions that can be adapted to the needs of Latin American countries as the outcome of the lessons learnt.

In particular, this approach perfectly suits the specific case of Argentina, which has come to a key stage where institutional and operating capacity building of multilevel governance has to be directed to pursuing territorial convergence, in order to facilitate the processes of regional sustainable development.