Cult-RInG

Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe have been established since 1987, stressing the importance of European identities. The Enlarged Partial Agreement on Cultural Routes currently comprises 31 routes contributing to protection and development of natural and cultural heritage. Cultural Routes are used as powerful tools to promote and preserve EU’s shared and diverse cultural identities, as well as provide a better understanding of the history of Europe through inter-regional exchanges of people, ideas and cultures. The impacts of Cultural Routes on SMEs’ innovation and competitiveness have showed that they are:

• at the heart of cultural tourism development,
• achieved a noteworthy impact and progress, and shown remarkable potential for SME generation, networking, social cohesion and intercultural dialogue,
• promoting the image of Europe,
• represent a source of innovation, creativity, small-business creation, and cultural tourism products and services development. 

There is a common challenge, in terms of evaluating and exploiting the benefits of existing cultural routes and deploy them in the development of new routes, so that Growth & Jobs targets can be met faster. The overall objective of the Cult-Ring project is to highlight the value of investments in European Cultural Routes, in terms of their contribution to Growth & Jobs, with capitalisation of good practices, policy learning, policy implementation, development of new Cultural Routes, monitoring and capacity building. Main outputs are Action Plans on CRs development and upgrading, with implementation and monitoring of improved policy instruments in 6 regions, communication and dissemination tools for policy learning and capacity building, contribution to EU policies and EU2020 targets. The beneficiaries are regional authorities looking for capturing the benefits of CRs, both existing ones with greater visibility and new ones, NGOs, European Networks, EU institutions, international organisations and other stakeholders.