Greater involvement of local and regional authorities in the planning and implementation via application of the partnership principle, inclusion of territorial disparities in the evaluation criteria and in the methodology for allocating financial aid, the opportunity to transfer centralised funding to shared management programmes, etc.
These are some of the proposals put forward in an analysis, published on Tuesday 30 June by the Conference of Peripheral Maritime Regions (CPMR), of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (see EUROPE 12517/9). The organisation believes that governance of the Recovery and Resilience Facility is an issue because it is essentially centralised at national level.
The report’s authors conclude that “this is likely to lead to a marginal involvement of local and regional authorities”, and point to the low level of participation of local and regional authorities in the European Semester budget process, for instance in the preparation of national programmes.
However, notes the CPMR, the Facility mainly targets the regions that have been worst hit by the pandemic and should therefore result in a “territorial diversification of investments”. According to the report, the partnership principle should therefore be extended to the preparation of recovery plans, and a code of conduct on partnership similar to the one in force under cohesion policy should be applied.
For more information, go to: https://bit.ly/2YPiIAg (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)