On Tuesday 17 January, the European Commission published its first progress report on the ‘New European Bauhaus’ (NEB) (see EUROPE 12791/19) and the ‘NEB Compass’, a project assessment tool.
A network of projects
The report notes that since its launch in 2020, NEB has built a “bottom-up transnational network” with over 600 partner organisations. “These are all relays that inspire and accompany NEB projects in the territories [while building] bridges between research, innovation, culture, education, businesses and associations”, commended Commissioner for Culture Mariya Gabriel.
She also recalled the importance of the first six NEB model projects, launched in 2022 with funding from Horizon Europe. As “large-scale, replicable local transformation projects”, “they are meant to inspire others so that the solutions we develop through NEB can help all our regions”, she stressed. The next 10 model projects will be launched in 2023 and will be financed with €50 million from the cohesion policy, added the Commissioner for Cohesion Policy, Elisa Ferreira.
Increased funding
The report highlights that all told more than €100 million, of which 50.5 million came from Horizon Europe, was allocated to NEB projects. Financing which the Commission intends to increase in the future, with an additional €196 million from Horizon Europe already planned for the period 2023-2024.
While Christian Ehler (EPP, German) and Marcos Ros Sempere (S&D, Spanish), co-rapporteurs on the dossier in the European Parliament, welcomed the Commission’s commitment, they insisted on the need for “the next financial framework to include a programme dedicated to NEB with a stable and sufficient budget [...] so that it is no longer dependent on other programmes, while at the same time encouraging the mobilisation of funds from the Member States and regional and local authorities”.
Mariya Gabriel admitted that it was “important to find ways to make the NEB sustainable” and assured that the Commission remains “open to all possible options”.
The compass: the antechamber of the label?
The Commission also presented the ‘NEB Compass’, an assessment tool to judge whether a given project falls within the NEB criteria. Here too, MEPs welcomed the initiative, but called on the Commission to apply the Compass criteria to all areas of legislation and to create a NEB label.
The compass “is part of the NEB labelling strategy. We want to have a label, but we have got to build it”, defended Elisa Ferreira.
Finally, the Commissioners announced that the 2023 edition of the ‘NEB Award’ will be dedicated to education and the inauguration of the ‘NEB Routes’, a discovery trail of youth projects funded by the DiscoverEU component of the Erasmus+ programme.
To read the report: https://aeur.eu/f/4xc (Original version in French by Hélène Seynaeve)