In early November 2022, the Nordic Council celebrated 70 years of Nordic Cooperation in Helsinki, Finland, at its annual summit. The Nordic Civil Society Network was invited to meet at the conference to discuss the progression of the network.
Into the second year of the network’s existence, its members are eager to take on a more active role in developing the 2025-2030 Action Plan for Our Vision 2030.
As a new network, the initial work has primarily been related to scrutinizing actions and decisions already initiated by the council. This has been important, but now the network wants to move away from being just a checkmark in the system and instead becoming an active partner in setting the direction for projects and policy aims in the Nordic Council.
The Nordic Cooperation Ministers also took the opportunity to meet in person with the network during the summit. ANE’s representative met with the Icelandic Co-operation Minister Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson, who is also the Icelandic Minister of Social Affairs & the Labour Market.
He has a background working in NGOs and encouraged the network to make a suggestion on how it wants to take part in the action plan work and to make it clear which points of the current action plan it found most important to carry forward. Finally, he expressed a clear wish from the ministers to make the next action plan more focused as well as easier to relate and react to for the general population, decision-makers, and civil society organisations.
This active approach was further inspired by meeting the Nordic Expert Group for Sustainable Development. The expert group was interested in usingthe Network members’ experiences in developing ways to ensure that their work was better founded and understood in the general population.
The Nordic Civil Society Network took these suggestions to heart. And in the coming period, it will propose how best to support the development of the 2025 action plan for Our Vision 2030. It will also suggest a way of formalising the role and structure of the network to ensure that the network will continue to develop and be a strong resource for the Nordic Council.
Read more about the role of the network here: https://www.norden.org/en/news/remit-nordic-civil-society-network-support-development-nordic-region-sustainable-and