The Balkan Forum

Mission

The Balkan Forum is a regional, multisector platform designed to advance sustainable cross-border dialogue and create a shared regional vision and agenda for cooperative action in the Balkan region based on economic development, democratic values, and the rule of law. We highlight good practices of regional cooperation to policy discussions and promote existing efforts to connect grassroots initiatives, knowledge, and successes to the decision-making levels that are responsible for policymaking and regional and/or EU integration. We adopt a positive approach as the guiding principle for our activities; rather than re-emphasizing the problems that have divided the Balkan populations for many years now, we focus heavily on the positive elements that unite them, including celebrating the diversity and highlighting shared aspirations and values of our societies.

Geographic focus

Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia

 
ApproachThe Balkan Forum serves as a platform for convening diverse leaders across sectors: civil society, private, and government. It acts as a neutral broker and facilitator to identify opportunities and catalyze promising collaborative initiatives, and it will leverage resources, assets, and relationships to incubate and scale up shared strategies for change. The Forum will consciously foster experimentation and innovation, especially in reaching out to governments to build consensus, translate ideas into action, and move beyond rhetoric on collaboration to real policy implementation.

Who is Involved: Connecting Partners and Amplifying Voices
The Balkan Forum aims to connect diverse initiatives, multiple stakeholders, and emerging social entrepreneurs in order to enable collaboration and maximize impact. Through ongoing dialogue with a growing network of leaders from civil society, academia, business, and government, the Forum helps its partners identify opportunities for collaborative action, develop coordinated strategies, and craft mutually agreed-upon action agendas. The Forum is committed to engaging young thinkers and innovative entrepreneurs and to amplifying progressive voices. It will bring together established and new initiatives, and strengthen the work of a wide range of individuals and organizations that are ready to collaborate across borders and sectors in pursuit of shared regional development goals.

Where Does Forum Work: Defining the Region and Scope
The Balkan Forum has an expansive, flexible view of the Balkan region and does not seek to exclude countries. As a starting place, the Forum focused on the Western Balkans and Greece – a region that includes countries aspiring to EU membership, sandwiched between the oldest Balkan member of the EU (Greece) and the newest one (Croatia). In tailoring todays activities, the Forum is expanding its communication to Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. The Forum is not only looking within the region, but also takes account of the region’s position relative to multiple other regions, within and beyond Europe. It seeks to learn from the successes and pitfalls of other regional initiatives.

Guiding Concepts of Balkan Forum Work

A Positive Agenda Focused on Action: By bringing people into a regional conversation that highlights the advantages of cooperation and opportunities for sustainable development, the Forum sets in motion a process within which it is possible to identify mutual interests and shared benefits.  The Forum takes a pragmatic approach and focuses on projects that are feasible, that enjoy broad support, and that can help to solve concrete problems.

Broadening Dialogue and Consensus: Effective regional cooperation requires closer and more inclusive cooperation across borders and sectors, including civil society, the private sector, and government. Enabling diverse actors to forge new partnerships, while also amplifying the voices of young and marginalized leaders, Forum tries to help unlock the potential for collective growth in the Balkans. The Forum relies on continuous dialogue with a growing network of partners to define its strategy, identify priorities, and formulate action agendas.

Leveraging the Region’s Resources: The region possesses the resources, talent, and potential to create solutions to the problems it faces. This is evidenced by the many innovative initiatives that already exist at the local and regional level. Unfortunately, such initiatives are often side-lined in favour of more conventional ideas and solutions. The Balkan Forum wants to connect, strengthen, and leverage forward-looking initiatives, institutions, and networks in the region, helping incubate and scale up effective strategies for change. The Forum’s success and integrity relies on the expertise and talents of the individuals in its network.

Lessons, Not Blueprints: Approaches to cooperation cannot be imported from other regions; but the Forum can draw on lessons learned from the experiences of others.  The Forum is a platform for sharing inspiration and ideas about how to encourage productive relationships and dialogue, even in times of crises.
Our workTogether with civil society, youth, journalists and media organizations, and diaspora from the Western Balkans region, we are: 
Building civil society and media networks and a strong regional voice in regional and Euro-Atlantic integration processes;  
Enhancing dialogue, relationships and cooperation among civil society actors, media and youth in the WB, and members of the diaspora communities from the region residing in EU, US and other countries;
Amplifying youth voices for regional dialogue and collaboration;
Increasing the capacity of CSO actors to do advocacy and strengthen their democratic governance;
Improving civil society’s knowledge base on specific areas through research and analysis on education, energy, tourism, the labor market and human capital.