Bavaria, Catalonia, and Latin America: a shared academic agenda

Obreal held a working meeting in Erlangen with Dr. Irma de Melo-Reiners, Executive Director of the Bayerisches Hochschulzentrum für Lateinamerika (BAYLAT), a body of the Bavarian State Ministry of Science and the Arts dedicated to promoting the internationalization of Bavarian universities toward Latin America. The meeting resumed conversations initiated in Buenos Aires in 2024, where both organizations coincided in joint working spaces organized with Argentina’s CIN, the DAAD, and the Delegation of the Generalitat de Catalunya for the Southern Cone.

This meeting is part of Obreal’s ongoing work to connect European regional actors with Latin America around agendas of higher education, innovation, and development. The collaboration with BAYLAT helps consolidate a Bavaria–Catalonia axis with real interregional reach: two regions with strong institutional roots and a long tradition of academic cooperation, now working toward a shared agenda.

During the meeting, concrete areas of collaboration were identified around joint initiatives and dialogue platforms. In particular, the potential involvement of Bavarian universities and their experience (especially in university-industry relations) in the Fourth Interregional Dialogue on Education and Development, scheduled for December 2026, was explored.

This relationship is not conceived as a one-off engagement. The joint work between both institutions contributes to strengthening a polycentric vision of international cooperation, in which European actors with regional roots engage with Latin America around concrete agendas and in which North and South share and co-construct solutions to common challenges.