Contributions made by decentralised cooperation between the European Union and Latin America to territorial cooperation in Latin America

The present study is the result of a process of reflection carried out under the auspices of the Observatory on Decentralised Cooperation (OCD) between the European Union and Latin America regarding the phenomenon of territorial cooperation in both regions. Its aim is to reflect upon the relevance and potential that public decentralised cooperation between Europe and Latin America has to strengthen in a decisive manner the territorial cooperation processes already underway in Latin America.The starting point for the study is the conviction that the territorial cooperation dynamics that have emerged in the heart of the European Union have been especially rich and that the experience accumulated in this fi eld represents a fundamental contribution to regional integration processes. The second important point of departure is the recognition that public decentralised cooperation between the European Union and Latin America is an emerging phenomenon, whose dynamism and specifi characteristics make it a privileged channel for the exchange of experiences between both regions and a means of enhancing local authorities’s administrative capacities and strengthening policies to promote social cohesion from a territorial perspective.It is these two premises that stimulated the Observatory’s interest in researching the extent to which decentralised cooperation could contribute to making territorial cooperation in Latin America more dynamic.