On 26 May 2026, I participated in the 90th Session of the OECD LEED Directing Committee in Maastricht, representing the European Committee of the Regions. The session is the first of a three-day sequence: the closed Directing Committee on 26 May, followed by the OECD Global Forum on Local Development on 27-28 May.<\/p>\n
The CoR’s presence at this closed session, alongside national delegations from Japan, Belgium, Finland, France, Greece and others, reflects a deliberate strengthening of the CoR-OECD institutional relationship. The LEED Directing Committee sets the OECD’s work programme on local employment and skills for 2027-2030: the research priorities, the policy tools, and the recommendations that will shape national and regional strategies across member states .<\/p>\n
The CoR’s contribution<\/strong><\/p>\n In my intervention under Agenda Item 5 on local skills partnerships for productivity growth, I presented the CoR’s position with three core arguments .<\/p>\n First, skills policy fails when it stops at the national level. Industrial transformation, demographic decline, and the green and digital transition hit local and regional authorities simultaneously and in highly differentiated ways. A rural mountain area, a post-industrial border region and a metropolitan area require fundamentally different responses. One-size-fits-all national programmes do not reach deep enough.<\/p>\n Second, local and regional authorities are not stakeholders to be consulted after decisions are made. They are strategic partners who must co-design transition pathways from the start. The CoR’s recently adopted opinion on the Union of Skills makes this point explicitly: cohesion policy, industrial policy and skills investment must be aligned, not managed in separate silos.<\/p>\n Third, inclusion must be a structural condition, not an afterthought. Transitions that reach only highly qualified workers in strong regions will deepen territorial inequalities, not reduce them. Public employment services must evolve into genuine coordinators of local skills ecosystems, with real devolution of mandate and resources to the local level.<\/p>\n What was heard<\/strong><\/p>\n The session brought together contributions from Japan, Belgium (Wallonia and Flanders), Finland, Greece and France, each presenting concrete models of local skills partnerships, sectoral governance, and labour market intelligence systems . The OECD Secretariat’s closing summary identified three cross-cutting themes for follow-up: the gender dimension of labour market inactivity, the mechanics of skills partnerships, and skills forecasting systems. These align directly with the priorities articulated in the CoR opinion on the Union of Skills .<\/p>\n Added value of the CoR-OECD cooperation<\/strong><\/p>\n The CoR’s participation in the LEED Directing Committee is not symbolic. It provides a direct channel for translating the lived experience of Europe’s 1 million local and regional elected representatives into the OECD’s global policy development process. Conversely, the OECD’s analytical tools, including spatial productivity studies such as the Veneto case presented at this session, offer evidence-based frameworks that the CoR can mobilise in its legislative work and in its engagement with European Commission proposals .<\/p>\n This structural partnership is an asset for ensuring that the EU’s competitiveness and cohesion agenda remains territorially anchored, and that the transition to a greener, more digital and more resilient economy does not leave the most vulnerable regions behind.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" On 26 May 2026, I participated in the 90th Session of the OECD LEED Directing Committee in Maastricht, representing the European Committee of the Regions. The session is the first of a three-day sequence: the closed Directing Committee on 26 May, followed by the OECD Global Forum on Local Development on 27-28 May. The CoR’s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1837,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[84],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1836","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1836"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1838,"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1836\/revisions\/1838"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1836"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1836"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cor.borbolycsaba.ro\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1836"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}