What Should a Europe-Africa Cooperation Project Leave Behind?
Over the last few years, cooperation between Europe and Africa in the cultural and creative sectors has gained newmomentum. New partnerships are emerging, mobility programmes are expanding, and creative ecosystems are increasinglylooking beyond their own borders to address shared challenges.
The European Union’s Africa-Europe Partnerships for Culture programme reflects this ambition by promoting more balanced and reciprocal cultural cooperation between the two continents. Building on this shared vision, I would like to reflect on one question that, after more than twenty years working in Cultural and Creative Industries and several years researching creative ecosystem development and public policies, I have repeatedly found myself returning to one question: What should remain once a cooperation project has ended?
Every international project produces tangible outputs: partnerships, pilot actions, reports, study visits, events and new professional relationships. These are important achievements and often represent the indicators by which projects are evaluated.
Yet their most valuable legacy is often something far less visible. It is the knowledge generated while people work together.
Not only technical knowledge, but institutional knowledge: how trust is built between organisations; how different stakeholders participate in decision-making; how governance adapts over time; and how public institutions, universities,intermediary organisations and creative communities learn to work together despite having different objectives, languages and organisational cultures.
These questions are just as relevant in Accra as they are in Bologna, in Dakar as in Rotterdam, Toulouse or in a much smaller city or rural community. Scale may differ, but the governance challenges are often remarkably similar.
The answers will inevitably differ because every ecosystem reflects its own history, institutions, resources and communities.
Yet this diversity is precisely where the greatest learning opportunity lies.
Looking across different territories and governance models, I have repeatedly observed the same pattern. Cooperation projects successfully connect organisations and professionals, but much of the knowledge they generate remains with the people who participated in them. When funding ends, professionals move on, priorities change, partnerships slow down, and valuable experience risks becoming fragmented instead of becoming part of the institutional memory of the ecosystem.
If Europe and Africa are investing in long-term cooperation, this may be one of the next challenges worth addressing.
Across both continents there are already extraordinary assets including universities researching Cultural and Creative Industries and cultural policy, public institutions experimenting with new governance models, intermediary organisations, creative hubs, clusters, professional associations, research centres, networks such as the UNESCO Creative Cities Network, and communities like b.creative itself.
Together, they represent an immense yet still underused learning infrastructure.
The next challenge may not be creating more expertise, but better capitalising on the knowledge, relationships and institutionalcapacities that already exist.
From my perspective, this is where the concept of permeability becomes particularly useful.
A permeable ecosystem is not simply an open ecosystem. It is an ecosystem capable of allowing knowledge, experience andrelationships to circulate across institutional, disciplinary and geographical boundaries. It enables a researcher to learn frompractitioners, a public official to observe how another city approaches governance, or an intermediary organisation to adapt(not replicate) solutions developed elsewhere.
Permeability transforms individual experience into collective capacity.
It also creates the conditions for something that cannot be planned but is often responsible for the most meaningful innovations: serendipity.
Some of the most valuable ideas I have encountered did not emerge during formal conferences or project meetings. They emerged while visiting another organisation, discussing everyday governance challenges with colleagues, or observing how similar problems were approached differently because of different institutional or cultural contexts.
Those conversations revealed that, although we often use different languages, policy frameworks and organisational models,we are frequently trying to solve remarkably similar problems.
They should not remain exceptional.They should become an integral part of how cooperation between Europe and Africa is designed.This does not necessarily require entirely new structures. Many of the infrastructures already exist.
The next step could simply be to make better use of them. One way forward would be to strengthening peer-learning between public officials and cultural intermediaries; encouraging reciprocal institutional residencies; creating long-term communities of practice connecting practitioners and researchers; and using existing international networks not only to exchange projects, but also governance practices, institutional learning and practical experience. In this way, cooperation becomes genuinely reciprocal because Europe learns from Africa as much as Africa learns from Europe.
The objective is not convergence or identifying a single model to replicate across different territories. It is to strengthen our collective capacity to understand why certain solutions work, under which conditions they work, and how their underlying principles can be thoughtfully adapted elsewhere.
For me, this is where the future of Europe-Africa cooperation becomes particularly exciting.
Not because it offers the opportunity to create more projects, but because it offers the opportunity to create stronger ecosystems that continuously learn from one another and retain that learning long after individual projects have ended.
The reflection emerges from the continuous dialogue between professional practice and policy research.If the question is What Should a Europe-Africa Cooperation Project Leave Behind?, my answer would be simple: not only successful projects, but ecosystems that become progressively better at learning, adapting and governing together.
Perhaps that is the most valuable legacy Europe-Africa creative cooperation can leave for future generations. Nessuno Indietro APS Sede legale: S.S. Adriatica Nord 112, 60019 Senigallia (AN) | C.F. 92058220424 | nessunoindietroaps@gmail.com | www.nessunoindietroaps.it
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