EU Regional Policies and Development Agencies Round Table Meeting

1. In Turkey, the need to establish the Regional Development Agencies (RDA's) that are equipped with public resources and powers, has arisen during the process of implementing the EU supported regional development programs by the State Planning Organisation (SPO). According to the decentralized structuring principle espoused by the EU, the implementer, the beneficiary, and the monitoring agencies of the above mentioned programs have to be independent of each other. The beneficiaries of the EU supported regional development programs are provincial governments, municipalities, SME's, KOSGEB (the Union of SME's), NGO's,universities, chambers of industry and trade as well as agricultural co-ops. The program is run by the SPO Regional Development and Cohesion General Directorate in Ankara, and in the regions by the Program Coordination Centers, Program Implementation Units, Regional Technical Secretary and in the program provinces by Local Technical Secretary who s directly linked to the SPO. Nevertheless, since the Program coordination and Implementation Units are not legally autonomous bodies but operate in direct connection with the SPO, they cause administrative, legal, financial and technical problems. Therefore a regional administrative body is needed to allocate the pre-accession funds to the beneficiaries according to predetermined regional priorities.
2. The budget of the EU supported regional development programs implemented by the SPO since 2003 is 273,86 million €. The EU contribution to this budget is 232 million € and Turkey contributed 41,86 million €. The EU funds formulated as micro-grants today is expected to cover large infrastructural funds proposed by municipalities and provincial governments pursuant Turkey's starting EU negotiations. Within the framework of 2007-2013 IPA pre-accession funds, about a billion Euro is expected to be allocated to Turkey. What must be underscored is that greater amount of IPA funds will be accesible by the local administrations rather than the NGO's, chambers and universities.

3. The founding of RDA's has been neccessitated by two EU project financing needs:
* The needs and priorities of the region ought to be determined by the participation of all the actors in the region and the need to make tenders according to those priorities;
* The need to increase the local capacity of project development and implementation
The main duty of the RDA's is to develop regional strategy plans in cooperation with the main beneficiaries (municipalities, chambers, NGO's..) as well as the other public institutions in the region.

4. SPO believes that the local administrative, technical and human capacity is not satisfactory where the development programs are being run, and thus finds it necessary to be the implementing agency of the EU supported development programs in the initial years. SPO plans to transfer the duty of developing regional strategies to the local actors and assume a coordinating role as soon as they gain sufficient level of competency.