The ATTRACTIVE DANUBE project partners met for the fourth time at a Steering Committee meeting in Sofia, Bulgaria.

The skyline of Sofia, Bulgaria, with the Vitosha mountain in the background during winter, Author: podoboq Sofia, Bulgaria, CC BY 2.0,

The participatory planning process that started almost one year ago was finished just before the Sofia meeting. Project partners had a unique chance to present their final selection of national territorial attractiveness indicators; indicators pre-selected and discussed at three rounds of national workshops with relevant stakeholders, experts for spatial development of the project partners’ countries. Indicators are now being uploaded into a clear and user friendly tool, the main outcome of the project – a platform for monitoring territorial attractiveness indicators available on a Danube-wide scale as well as at national scale. These national platforms are now being fine-tuned by each country. What difficulties have the project partners met when using the platforms, what are the observations of the stakeholders, where do they see the foreseen risk. This was all discussed during the breakout sessions of the meeting.

Project partners share experiences with stakeholder’s participation in a breakout session

What is coming next? The fourth period of the project will be dedicated to capacity building seminars. How to organise them, who to involve, what is expected. Brainstorming of new ideas for the six upcoming months were moderated by the leader of the work package. And, transnational workshops in three countries: Serbia (Belgrade), Slovakia (Kosice) and Romania (Bucharest). We will inform you about the dates.

Rather controversial areas, areas under development or areas as the best practice of sustainable development are the usual cases for the study visits organised by the host partners. The choice of the host partner, the Bulgarian Economic Forum, was Sofia’s business centre.