Brussels, 11/10/2012 (Agence Europe) - The European municipalities and regions believe that what is at stake in the negotiations on the legislative package to reform cohesion policy centres around the question of strengthening the partnership principle. The European Council of Municipalities and Regions (CEMR) concluded with this appeal in a workshop organised within the framework of the Open Days initiative, “Local development is a key pillar of EU integrated territorial development policies 2014-2020”. This appeal was echoed by Constanze Krehl (S&D, Germany), rapporteur on the general regulation for cohesion policy, who explained during the conference that “fostering territorial development on a sub regional level is a crosscutting issue for inclusive growth”. She emphasised that “what we see in the new legislative proposals is the common approach to support a strong community led local development to reinforce the multilevel governance through real multi-funded local development strategies”. Carola Gunnarsson, president of thematic platform on CEMR's sustainable local and territorial development platform stated that, “It is time to highlight the territorial dimension and local development in work undertaken at European level”, which therefore needs to be more of the focus of attention in the policy debate than was the case in a previous programming periods. (MD/trans.fl)