New report on municipal friendship agreements

Vigdis Nygaard, NORCE has published a report analyzing 50 years of cooperation between municipalities in Northern Norway and Northwest Russia in the period 1972 to 2022. The study documents signing of 30 agreements involving 28 different northern Norwegian municipalities. This cooperation grew from a formal exchange of delegations of administrative staff and politicians to a broader civil society involvement. The friendship was most active during the 1990-ies, and gradually became less regular. Only a handful of municipalities had an active cooperation when Russia’s war in Ukraine stopped all cooperation in 2022. The report offers some recommendations on how to use this experience when developing new forms of cooperation with other partners in a different geography at local level.

Link to the report: https://hdl.handle.net/11250/3157148