The European Committee of the Regions (CoR) is currently drafting an opinion entitled "Effectively engaging local and regional authorities in the preparation of the Partnership Agreements and Operational Programmes for the 2021-2027 period". The rapporteur for this opinion is Mr Juraj Droba (SK/ECR), Chairman of the Bratislava Self-Governing Region.
The involvement of local and regional authorities in the preparation of the Partnership Agreements and Operational Programmes, in line with the principles of partnership and multilevel governance, is a key prerequisite to ensure a place-based approach in cohesion policy programming.
Taking into account the evidence brought forward by the CoR study on the matter, the opinion aims at assessing and politically commenting on the involvement of local and regional authorities in the ongoing programming exercise for the 2021-2027 period, and at putting forward recommendations for enhancing their engagement.
The draft opinion will be adopted at the CoR COTER commission meeting on 22 June 2021. The adoption of the opinion at the CoR Plenary Session is foreseen for 12-14 October 2021.
In order to obtain further information from the ground on the involvement of local and regional authorities in the preparation of the programming documents for the 2021-2027 period, the COTER commission is conducting a survey on the matter, which is targeted at representatives of local and regional authorities, managing authorities of Structural Funds Operational Programmes, as well as to other stakeholders at local and regional level who are involved in the preparation of the Partnership Agreements or Operational Programmes.
Extended deadline: The survey, which will feed into the preparation of the CoR opinion, is open until 11 July 2021 and can be found here.
In addition, if you have any written contributions or position papers relevant to the subject, you are kindly invited to send them by email to the COTER secretariat (details below), which will forward them to the rapporteur's team.
For further information, please contact the COTER secretariat: coter@cor.europa.eu