“For me personally, in my job international cooperation means almost everything – because it is what I do on a daily basis. But also, I think that most countries in this group are small countries, we need the international cooperation, we need to be able to discuss and debate about our many small special fields of work.”
“With bilateral or smaller group collaboration you can really go down to the “nitty gritty” details, and then when you are close to each other geographically and culturally, it sometimes just makes it easier because you can start your collaboration on a higher level. If you have a cooperation that goes way back, then you have something to build upon.” “In bigger EU cooperation scnearious you can be confronted with a totally different way of doing things, which is interesting, but very often this means that you have to fight more for the way you see the world, We like having guidelines, but we prefer having non- binding guidelines.”
“The main challenge for now is probably the financial situation. We are all facing major cut downs. And this is of course always difficult for an organisation, but at the same time it is difficult for us to advertise what we are doing. We need the big disasters to prove to people that they need us, that they need this life insurance, sort of say.”
Tine Weiss Thorsøe holds the position of Senior Adviser at the Danish Emergency Management Agency (DEMA).