European Structural and Investment Funds

European Territorial Cooperation programmes consultation report

July 14, 2020 by Patrick Douglas No Comments | Category Replacement funding

This week our European Territorial Cooperation (ETC) team published its findings report from the consultation into Scotland’s participation in the 2021-27 period of ETC programmes.

The consultation followed on from workshops the team held across Scotland in autumn last year. The European Policies Research Centre released a report on these workshops titled European Territorial Cooperation in Scotland Post 2020 at the end of October 2019.

The consultation opened for contributions on 10 January 2020 and closed on 24 April. In total, there were 21 respondents to this exercise, most of which were local authorities and public bodies. Some of the key findings in the report are:

• ETC is a well-established way to facilitate meaningful and beneficial international collaboration (this was also noted in the Consultation into the Replacement for the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) Post-EU Exit in Scotland)
• It helps to identify new solutions to common challenges in a cost effective way, which minimises duplication by enabling the pooling of knowledge and resources.
• It allows partners to achieve “critical mass to develop, test and pilot specialised/ innovative actions and activities in ways that would not be possible working in isolation”.
• The key themes from the consultation are green and blue priorities (low carbon, blue economy, renewable energy). Geographies of importance are the Island of Ireland and Nordic countries.

This report will help guide the Scottish Government’s approach to working with Member States in each of the ETC programmes. In doing so we aim to correlate Scotland’s programme needs with those of our European neighbours.

We would like to thank everyone who was involved in this whole process, including those who responded to the consultation and attended our workshops last year.

Tags: consultation, ETC, European Territorial Cooperation

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