On Friday 29 September, at an informal meeting in Murcia, Spain, the European ministers responsible for cohesion policy agreed that post-2027 cohesion policy should be “more flexible”.
The Spanish Secretary General for European Funds, Mercedes Caballero, who chaired the meeting, said that the ministers had discussed how to make cohesion policy programming more flexible, so that the actions implemented take account of the “particularities” of each region.
According to the Spanish minister, the ability to manage responses to different crises also needs to be strengthened.
“Cohesion policy also has its own long-term convergence objective”, added Ms Caballero. She indicated that the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council would seek to have conclusions on post-2027 cohesion policy adopted at the ‘General Affairs’ Council on 30 November.
She also mentioned the need to take into account a new set of indicators (e.g. from Eurostat) for Cohesion Policy 2.0, an idea that appears in the Spanish Presidency’s working document submitted to the ministers for this discussion. For Mercedes Caballero, cohesion policy must also contribute to the EU’s strategic autonomy, especially in the current geopolitical context.
The Commissioner for Cohesion Policy, Elisa Ferreira, said that “the method is very important. Cohesion policy must remain focused on the specific characteristics of each region”, she declared. She also spoke of the benefits of “local democracy”. Among the changes to be made to cohesion policy, the Commissioner cited the simplification of rules (in particular for the payment of funds to beneficiaries) and the need to make the policy more flexible. European funding is part of the solution, but we also need to reflect on the issue of “development traps” (regions that are no longer progressing beyond a certain threshold), said Ms Ferreira.
Asked about the idea of new indicators, the Commissioner said that these were ideas from the Spanish Presidency. The distribution of the Cohesion Fund already includes indicators other than GDP, she pointed out. The Commissioner also warned that new indicators would have to be considered while “avoiding opening a Pandora’s box that cannot be closed again”.
The Spanish working document stresses the need to “reform the EU’s cohesion policy and adapt it to the new geopolitical, social and economic reality of the different regions of the Union”. To this end, the coexistence of this policy with the Recovery and Resilience Facility over recent months “undoubtedly allows us to explore the lessons learned from two instruments that have been crucial to convergence, growth and welfare in the Union”, says the Spanish Presidency.
The debate is therefore focused on how to balance the coexistence of major reforms or investments at State level, with particular attention paid to the different realities of each region, beyond their relative GDP per capita. “All of this, with the ultimate purpose of making further progress towards the fundamental objective of the harmonious development of the regions enshrined in Article 174 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the EU”, the document concludes.
Raffaele Fitto, the Italian minister, recalled that cohesion policy represents a priority for Italy and that there is a need to defend and protect it. “As you know, there is a debate on the Union’s capacity to absorb new members, and cohesion policy will certainly be one of the aspects that will be discussed”, he said.
The President of the European Committee of the Regions, Vasco Alves Cordeiro, presented his ideas on the future of this policy (see EUROPE 13258/3).
Link to the Spanish working document: https://aeur.eu/f/8st (Original version in French by Lionel Changeur)