underline the importance of establishing territorial strategies to guide investments in an integrated and coordinated way
emphasise the role of Macro-Regional Strategies as an “established bottom-up and place-based instrument
highlight the importance and usefulness of the INTERACT, INTERREG Europe and ESPON
because cohesion policy's Common Provisions Regulation and the existing ETC-specific regulation do not sufficiently take into account the specificities of ETC, the CoR requests:
Option a) that in the upcoming programming period ETC be treated separately from the cohesion policy legislative package, or,
Option b) that the territorial specificities of ETC programmes be better taken into account in the next programming period.
The own initiative opinion on Boosting Growth and Cohesion in EU Border Regions was a non-legislative file.
Negotiations on future of ETC are still ongoing and are expected to be adopted by the end of 2019. Therefore the future of points mentioned in the opinion is yet unknown;
The opinion asks for ETC to be exempt from the State Aide notification, which will be the case, following the adoption of a Council Regulation which amends Council Regulation (EU) 2015/1588 of 13 July 2015 on the application of Articles 107 and 108 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to certain categories of horizontal State aid, which was adopted and published on 17 December 2018;
EU-wide online professional network (Futurium) run by the European Commission is now fully functional and used by stakeholders across the Union;
European Commission's DG REGIO has been carrying out Territorial Impact Assessments on a limited number of files using ESPON Quick Scan methodology;
Following the opinion, the European Commission's DG REGIO has sent a letter to all the EC Directorates in charge of EU funded programmes asking them to take into account EGTCs (European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation) as potential beneficiaries;
The European Cross-Border Mechanism regulation was adopted by the European Parliament and is currently being discussed by the European Council;
THE EUROPEAN COMMITTEE OF THE REGIONS
- believes that the EU's financial support to European Territorial Cooperation (ETC) initiatives should be significantly increased in the next MFF;
- stresses that the benefits of ETC are not only the projects itself but also the fact that a range of bodies at regional and local level including public authorities work together in common programmes and projects;
- underlines the importance of establishing territorial strategies to guide investments in an integrated and coordinated way;
- underlines that the co-legislators, the European Parliament and the Council, (…) should systematically consider the territorial impact in their negotiations on legislative proposals;
- calls for mutual recognition of certificates, diploma and vocational training to be strengthened;
- requests that that the territorial specificities of ETC programmes be better taken into account in the next programming period;
- underlines that cross-border cooperation suffers from a lack of available data and issues concerning the comparability of existing data due to different data-gathering methodologies and different legislation applied;
- regrets that many of the benefits and successes of ETC are untold because evaluation systems in cohesion policy and beyond are too narrow.