EUKI Interview: Dialogue as an Instrument in Project Implementation 

And yet another EUKI project has successfully come to a close. While it seemed like a farewell, in reality it marked the start of a continued collaboration between the partners from the two municipalities involved. Hand in hand, the municipality of Maribor guided the drafting of the Green Transition Strategy in Tuzla, as part of the EUKI project SAGT, which will come into force in 2027. Together they focused on three points: reducing harmful gas emissions, strengthening the circular economy through the sustainable use of natural resources, and protecting the environment. Thereby, Tuzla is now Bosnia and Herzegovina’s first city to approach the green transition on a strategic level. But the project’s impact went beyond drafting the Green Transition Strategy. Through the organisation of five local events in Tuzla which ensured multilevel stakeholder engagement SAGT brought together 157 participants from 53 different groups. These include members from civil society organisations, businesses, foreign actors, government and administration from regional or local level, media actors, academic institutions, and environment protection bodies – merging different sectors.

This raises the question, what components enabled the project to succeed in practice. Borut Jurišić and Nuša Lazar Koprivnik share the central ingredients for driving knowledge transfer. These are quite straightforward: Maribor shared its own best practices with the city of Tuzla for the Green Transition Plan, as well as its local frictions and struggles.

To tackle these challenges holistically, project partners needed to identify the overlap between energy inefficiency and its social dimensions. Through dialogue, the project sought to identify these connections and formulate a strategy addressing all aspects.

Sustained dialogue between the municipalities of Tuzla and Maribor was central to your project’s approach. What are the core ingredients for maintaining this dialogue?

Borut Jurišić: I must admit that there are several factors that just aligned, which made it much easier… things that cannot be planned, because they can go wrong as well. First off, it helped that we had some previous cooperation with the staff at Bit Center, and it was them who suggested the Municipality of Tuzla, because they had very good experience with the Mayor’s Office. And really, from the first time we had an online meeting, we just knew the chemistry among all three teams was there.

Of course, there are things that helped make this go smoothly. The choice of the two cities and regions was not random. Maribor and Tuzla share several similarities. Both are university cities with the similar population, industrial background, historical similarities.

During the project’s implementation, what was the main challenge you encountered while developing Tuzla’s Green Transition Strategy?

Nuša Lazar Koprivnik: The biggest initial challenge was the complexity of Tuzla’s starting position. The city’s air quality is heavily affected by the Tuzla Thermal Power Plant, combined with household coal heating, an old vehicle fleet, and frequent winter temperature inversions that trap pollutants over the city. Translating such a deeply rooted, multi-sectoral problem into a coherent, actionable strategic document was no small task.

At the same time, this was one of the first comprehensive green transition strategies of its kind in Bosnia and Herzegovina, so there was no local precedent to build on. The real challenge, then, was not only to draft a document, but to prepare a strategy solid enough to serve as a genuine foundation for future work – one that local institutions could truly stand behind and continue to build on for years to come.

Sharing best practices between project partners is an important part of engaging in fruitful dialogue. Could you recall the most successful example of knowledge transfer between the two municipalities?

Nuša Lazar Koprivnik: The clearest turning point was the study visit of the Tuzla delegation to Maribor. Rather than just hearing about our experience, the delegation could walk through the city and see concrete results in practice – the Mbajk bike-sharing system, the former pilot low-emission zone, the cycling infrastructure built under Maribor’s Cycling Strategy 2013–2030, and the air quality measures introduced through the municipal environmental protection program. Seeing these solutions in their real, everyday context made the transfer of knowledge far more tangible than any document could.

The foundation for all this was the two-day Knowledge Transfer Training, held in Tuzla in June 2024, where we introduced the EU’s Circular Cities and Regions Initiative (CCRI) methodology – its MAP–DESIGN–IMPLEMENT approach – together with practical tools for stakeholder mapping and prioritizing interventions. The Tuzla team used exactly this framework to map their own local stakeholders and identify priority areas, which then became the backbone of their own strategy.

Maribor successfully transferred its methodologies and experiences to Tuzla. But communication is not a one-way street. What did Maribor learn from Tuzla through this collaboration? 

Borut Jurišić: Although Maribor was the good practice holder, and those practices were transferred to Tuzla, there were case studies in Tuzla as well, that Maribor was very interested in.

One of the examples was the tourist offer of Tuzla based on its salty lakes, which demonstrates how a byproduct of industry in the city can become a resource for tourism, as the lakes formed due to the revitalization of the salt mines. The water was pumped to the surface and the lakes appeared early in the 21st century and became a tourist attraction in the city.

Another example was the revitalization of a former dumpsite, which became the city’s new green area, used as a city cemetery. This showcases the revitalization of a degraded area owned by the city.

And what now?

As Borut Jurišić and Nuša Lazar Koprivnik highlight: knowledge transfer does not function when the specific context of the place is not taken into account. At the heart of proper knowledge transfer lies the flexibility to adapt to the place. This partly explains how the project successfully set up the Guidelines for the Green Transition Strategy in Tuzla: by not only replicating the successes of Maribor but instead understanding the local context of Tuzla and its accompanying challenges. However, the added value also derives from the two-way dialogue that was established between the two municipalities. In return, practices also flowed from Tuzla to Maribor. Now Maribor is transforming degraded areas into a city cemetery, following Tuzla’s example.

The two-sided corridor of knowledge transfer carved between the two municipalities will continue to advance the green transition in both cities.