MedBEESinessHubs project focuses on the development of business and regional clusters under the thematic objective of the honeybee and its products. A key prerequisite for achieving this objective is the use of well structured, highly democratic and bottom-up approaches which can bring stakeholders together and create strategies that are based on consensus parameters.

Capitalising on ‘Structured Democratic Dialogue – SDD’ and the success story of ‘Melissochoria’ developed under the Interreg MED 2014-2020 funded project MEDFEST, the steppingstone has been set for the creation of the MedBEESinessHubs regional clusters. ‘Melissochoria’ –villages of honey- is a cluster of villages in rural Cyprus branded around the honeybee and its products.

The Capitalisation process started with the ‘train-the-trainer’ course, a mixture of online and physical presence workshops. Over a period of 3 months and through a series of 4 online workshops, 15 trainers across the five MedBEESinessHubs regions of Cyprus, Egypt, Italy, Lebanon and Palestine, were introduced to the concept and ideology behind the Structured Democratic Dialogue. Afterwards, they gathered in Nicosia (Cyprus) in late June 2022, together with other key stakeholders from their regions, where they had the opportunity to engage in two full days of highly interactive sessions and experience first-hand the Structured Democratic Dialogue (SDD) dynamic.

Over the months of July and August 2022, the 15 trained trainers and stakeholders from Egypt, Italy, Lebanon and Palestine, using their acquired knowledge and experience from Nicosia, brought together a total of 95 stakeholders in their own series of regional interactive SDD workshops, all with the aim of setting the foundation of five clusters based on the theme of the honeybee and its products in their partner regions. This foundation will lead towards the building of the MedBEESinessHubs across five Mediterranean regions.