Plan D.Oiran — Four Futures for a Fragile Transboundary Lake
A €1.4 million, four-partner Interreg project to permanently manage Doiran Lake across the Greek–North Macedonian border. GAUSS Institute delivered the project’s strategic plan, its public-awareness campaign, and its logo and website — three of the four service contracts behind partner MSS – Bitola’s share of the project.
Interreg IPA CBC Greece – the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 2014–2020 · Subsidy Contract CN1-S.02.3-SC 012Project at a Glance
The four formal beneficiaries of Plan D.Oiran. GAUSS worked beneath MSS – Bitola, the smallest of the four in budget terms but the one whose on-the-ground delivery GAUSS carried most of.
Objective & Summary
Doiran Lake — 43.1 km² shared between Greece (15.8 km²) and North Macedonia (27.3 km²), a Natura 2000 site (GR1230003) supporting roughly 9,000 residents through agriculture, fisheries and animal husbandry — had never had a genuine, jointly managed development plan. A catastrophic flood in 1955–56 and a severe drought in 1989 devastated its ecosystem and collapsed the local fishing industry; tourism and small-scale agriculture have since brought some revival, but decades after the countries’ first water-sharing arrangements, there was still no shared management mechanism.
Plan D.Oiran set out to build that mechanism directly: a permanent co-management structure, backed by infrastructure (a telemetric water-monitoring network, lake-cleaning works and vessels), stakeholder training, public awareness, and — underpinning all of it — a rigorous strategic plan for where the lake area should be headed over the next two decades. Of MSS – Bitola’s four work strands, GAUSS delivered three: the strategy itself, the public campaign that carried it to citizens and businesses, and the project’s logo and website.
- Megatrend and scenario analysis for the Doiran Lake area to 2040
- Full SWOT analysis and stakeholder consultation
- Prioritised long-term strategy and costed action plans
- Set 1: five workshops by age group, from first-graders to NGO activists
- Set 2: five stakeholder forums (institutions, farmers, tourism operators, NGOs)
- Joint closing conference, 22 September 2020
- Logo: six mood boards proposed against a required three
- WordPress website at plandoiran.eu — Macedonian, Greek, English
- 12 months’ maintenance, admin training, 5 years’ hosting
GAUSS Institute’s three separate subcontracts with MSS – Bitola. Only Lot 2 — stakeholder consultations and co-management training — went to a different contractor, DETRA Center of Skopje.
How the €1.4M Project Divided Its Work
Bar length shown relative to WP6, the largest package. GAUSS delivered the substantial majority of MSS – Bitola’s share across WP2, WP3 and WP4.
The four 2040 futures GAUSS built for Doiran Lake under Lot 1 — later presented directly to the public at the September 2020 awareness workshops
Role & Activities of the GAUSS Institute
Lot 1 — the strategic studies: a full foresight exercise (30+ megatrends narrowed to five), a four-scenario framework for 2040, a full SWOT analysis, and a long-term strategy with costed action plans, led by Dr. Renata Nechkovska Petreska.
Lot 3 — public awareness workshops, delivered entirely by GAUSS over two weeks in September 2020, under COVID-19 safety protocols:
Contract PD-2 — logo and website: key expert Jove Pargovski (graphic designer, 15 years’ experience, credited on sites including ps2.mk and off-road.mk) proposed six mood boards for the logo; the trilingual WordPress site at plandoiran.eu followed, with a year of maintenance, admin training and a Macedonian manual, plus five years of hosting on GAUSS’s own servers.
Across all three contracts: GAUSS advanced €9,000 in bridge financing to MSS in September 2020 so the wider project’s cash flow could keep moving while EU and government reimbursement was pending, and delivered inception, draft and final reports for each contract in Macedonian and English.
Outputs (Deliverables)
- Strategic Foresight, Scenario Analysis and Long-Term Strategies for Doiran Lake Area — Lot 1.
- Ten public-facing awareness events across two parallel workshop tracks (Set 1 by age group, Set 2 by stakeholder sector), converging in a joint final conference — Lot 3.
- The Plan D.oiran project logo, in vector and raster formats with supporting letterhead and folder templates — PD-2.
- The trilingual project website (plandoiran.eu), with a year of maintenance, an administrator training session and a Macedonian maintenance manual — PD-2.
- Participant materials for every workshop — printed study excerpts, agendas, presentations and branded merchandise — plus an interactive online “challenge” platform and a project YouTube channel.
Outcomes
Delivered under pandemic conditions, in the same two-week window across two parallel tracks, GAUSS’s Lot 3 campaign reached the full spectrum of Dojran’s community — schoolchildren, young adults, farmers and fishermen, tourism operators, NGO activists, and public institutions — closing with a conference that put MSS, DETRA and GAUSS’s own experts on the same stage to share results. The recommendations citizens and business owners heard at those workshops were not generic environmental messaging: they were drawn directly from GAUSS’s own Lot 1 strategy, so the same “Nature and Nurture” vision ran from the technical studies through to the public square.
Significance
Small transboundary lakes like Doiran rarely get the sustained institutional attention their fragility deserves — caught between two national bureaucracies, neither of which is fully responsible, they tend to drift until a crisis forces action, as the 1955–56 flood and 1989 drought once did. Naming the “do nothing” future explicitly and starkly enough, alongside a genuinely preferable alternative and a costed path toward it, only matters if it reaches the people who have to live the choice. By carrying its own strategy from the studies into the workshops and the final conference itself, GAUSS closed a loop that many technical-assistance projects leave open.
Holding three of MSS – Bitola’s four service contracts — the intellectual core (the strategy), the public engagement (the workshops), and the public face (the logo and website) — reflects a recurring pattern in GAUSS’s portfolio: winning trust for one substantive piece of technical work tends to open the door to the next. The €9,000 bridge-financing arrangement with MSS is a further, small but telling sign of how deep that trust had become by this stage in the partnership.
Implemented under the Interreg IPA Cross-Border Cooperation Programme “Greece – the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia 2014–2020,” led by the Region of Central Macedonia. The content of this page does not necessarily reflect the official position of the European Union or the programme’s Managing Authority.