Co-design of a local strategy for the integration of third country nationals

Cluj-Napoca, located in the centre of Transylvania, Romania, is a multicultural city with a rising digitalization and innovation focus. The municipality aims to become a genuine European space, innovative and welcoming.

In the context of the “European Pact for Integration”, an AMIF-funded project, Cluj-Napoca developed an integration strategy which focuses on 2 policy areas: education and labour-market.

1/ The first phase of the project, ahead of the development of the Integration strategy, consisted of an assessment of the participants needs through an Internal Intercultural Review which followed the methodology of the Council of Europe based on the InterCultural Cities (ICC) Index. This tool contains a limited number of strong indicators which make it easier to identify and communicate where a city stands in relation to intercultural integration.

2/ Based on Review’s results, the municipality engaged in a policy co-design process to develop the City’s Integration Strategy with the support of local stakeholders through Policy Design roundtables.

3/ The Cluj-Napoca municipality was supported in the development, the testing and the evaluation of its strategy by the EPI project’s technical partners and external experts.

The Cluj-Napoca integration strategy followed 2 steps:

1. Development of the processes and tools to support the integration (June – August 2021)
2. Piloting the processes and tools developed (September – November 2021)

In order to encourage foreigners to start a new life in Cluj and support them throughout their integration process, while taking into consideration the diversity of their interests and needs, the municipality decided to focus on the development and piloting of a One-Stop-shop online and offline
Partnership of the European Pact for Integration: seven different cities, four technical partners and two project coordinators. The partner cities were Cartagena (Spain), Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Dietzenbach (Germany), Linkoping (Sweden), Lublin (Poland), Ravenna (Italy), and Riga (Latvia). The Association of Intercultural Cities that runs the Spanish Network of Intercultural Cities was amongst the technical partners, providing the project while the ICC programme was providing specific expertise on how to use and interpret the Intercultural Cities Index.

The presentation shared at the Includ-EU workshop 1 is available under this link.

Website of this project: https://epi-project.com/en/

About the Intercultural Cities Index: https://www.coe.int/en/web/interculturalcities/about-the-index