France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, the organising countries of this initiative, believe that holding an EU-LAC Forum of local governments, as a preparatory event for the EU-LAC Summit, will be a useful contribution to the bi-regional process. Making the Forum part of the next EU-LAC Summit preparatory process introduces the dimension of decentralised cooperation into the biregional EU-LAC dialogue. The EU-LAC local representative associations have shown their willingness to engage in this first initiative in order to offer a local approach to the bi-regional EU-LAC dialogue and to deepen the relationship between the two regions.