‏E-DEN – From E-Database Empowering networks to Good Governance Platform

It is with Europe’s citizens in mind that the ministers responsible for local and regional government of the 47 member States of the Council of Europe launched in 2009 a major survey of difficulties and obstacles that hamper the cooperation across the borders and agreed in 2011 to further develop their cooperation with a view to reduce or remove those obstacles.

With the help of ISIG of Gorizia (Italy) the data collected through a series of data collection tools (in 2009 and in 2014 and yearly since 2017) and  have been systematised and organised in such a way as to enable all actors of cross-border cooperation to find examples that correspond to their situation and solutions that may help them to adopt the response to their needs.

In the last years, E-DEN has represented a major asset for policy-makers and practitioners interested in learning from the good practices shared by their European colleagues. Today, E-DEN contains more than 630 case studies on Cross-Border Cooperation covering different topics (e.g. Health, Environment, Administration, etc.) shared by 56 contributors (e.g. Institutions, Local Administrations, Euroregions, etc.) from 24 European countries.

The relevance acquired by E-DEN suggested that online repositories of good practices also represent a best practice in themselves, due to their potential in sharing information and promoting peer-to-peer exchanges.

In this perspective, the implementation of the E-DEN Platform, an integrated common digital environment to consult and share case studies and good practices on Good Democratic Governance, is an innovative and effective solution to showcase all efforts performed by the Council on this matter.

The new, expanded E-DEN allows:

  1. to centralise on one digital environment, case studies, experiences, results and good practices promoted and realized in the frameworks of different Council of Europe programmes, thus allowing stakeholders to access them in a more practical and efficient way.
  2. to browse thematically information throughout different Good Governance programmes and tools. By implementing a specifically tailored tagging linking thematically case studies and contributors, the platform allows users to access and consult all entries pertaining to the specific issue they are interested in, independently of the programme in which the activity took place and/or of their geographical localisation.
  3. to browse information spatially, thanks to the geolocation of case studies and contributors.
  4. to further disseminate Council of Europe’s actions, programmes and tools between stakeholders and beyond.

The E-DEN platform is a compilation of both difficulties recorded across the European frontiers and solutions found to overcome them.

E-DEN aims at enabling all actors implementing Good Democratic Governance to find examples, tools, opportunities and solutions that correspond to their situation and may help them to adopt the response to their needs.