Rural Europe on the move English_chap7_13 | Page 56

CHAPTER 11
9a. PREPARE Gathering in Croatia 2009
9b. 9c. and in Albania in 2016
10a. 10b. Balkan Rural Parliament in 2018
Moving to the
Western Balkan
countries
European Commission to organise with experts from the European
to the Balkan countries. Over the a travelling workshop in the same Commission, PREPARE partners and
decade between 2006 and 2016, way we did in Estonia and Sweden other leading European NGOs. Then
PREPARE helped in the creation in 1999. People from the civil and Commissioner Dacian Cioloş strongly
and increasingly active work of public sectors of rural life from six supported this event. I wrote a report
national civil society networks in Balkan countries and Turkey took on these events, ‘Empowering rural
each of the former countries of the part in six simultaneous travelling stakeholders in the Western Balkans’,
Yugoslav Federation. These networks workshops in Serbia, Montenegro which was published by the European
have not only become PREPARE and North Macedonia, together Commission.
PREPARE then turned its attention
partners, but are also now among the
civil-society organisations from 40
European countries which now form
the family of the biennial European
Rural Parliaments, of which the first
was held in 2013 on the model of the
national rural Parliaments first held in
Sweden.
Two of the ex-Yugoslav countries,
Slovenia and Croatia, have joined the
European Union. In 2014, in order to
support our friends in the other Balkan
countries, which still expect to join
the EU in the foreseeable future, we
decided to seek the support of the
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