ESPON EGTC and CESCI organised a panel dedicated to cross-border public services during the ESPON Presidency Seminar on the 6^th of November, 2024. The Seminar concentrated on the Hungarian EU Presidency’s priority topic with the title ‘Ensuring quality services for all people and places’.

The keynotes and the presentations of the seminar discussed the event’s topic from different viewpoints such as the definition of essential services and their timely, spatial, cultural and age-based conditions; territorial inequalities and polarisation; the role of the settlement structure in the access to public services; the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the preferences of the citizens; the political impacts of the quality of public services, etc.

CESCI was invited by ESPON EGTC to co-host one of the four expert panels on the first day of the seminar which was focussing on the cross-border context of the topic. The first speaker of the panel moderated by Gyula Ocskay, secretary general of CESCI was Nicolas Rossignol, assistant director of ESPON EGTC who summarised the results of the ESPON Cross-Border Public Service 2.0 project. Within the project, the experts enumerated more than 1500 existing cross-border public services the majority of which are of a transport nature.

Siegfried Weinert, manager of cross-border cooperation of the Emergency Service of Lower Austria introduced one case study example, namely the principles, the evolution and the current system of the Austrian-Czech cross-border rescue services. The presentation gained special attention motivating the audience to get more detailed information during the Q and A session.

The last presentation was given by Jean Rubió, an expert on cross-border studies of the Mission Opérationnelle Transfrontalière (MOT) and Bertrand Fribourg, project manager of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d’Azur Region who spoke about the Observ’Alp project of the Interreg ALCOTRA programme whose aim is to provide reliable and relevant cross-border data for the design of public services.

The outcomes of the panel were presented at the subsequent reporting session by the moderator. The main message was that while business services can easily cross state borders, equal access to quality public services is still oftentimes hampered.