News

Following the decision to anchor the analysis of the regional funding and financing (F&F) opportunities to the concrete needs of the Vanguard Initiative's Pilots, a process was launched to collect relevant information from three selected Pilots (3DP, ESM and Bio-economy).

A first level of analysis was conducted starting from the available information in the DG Regio pilot actions' business cases reports. The results showed a quite heterogenous landscape, resulting from both the maturity and the scope of the different initiatives, but also, and more important, the lack of relevant details for an adequate evaluation of F&F opportunities. To overcome these difficulties, a template was developed by the Co-funding and Co-finance Task Group to collect the missing information from the Pilots and, by the end of July 2020, the results started to be processed and analysed to produce a F&F roadmap for each Pilot, with the necessary details to assess the existing and future opportunities.

On 17 November, a first workshop targeting the 3DP Pilot was organised with its participating regions, to present and discuss F&F opportunities and gaps. The discussions highlighted the existence of a reasonably good coverage of F&F programmes and instruments related with project development and market uptake in most regions but also significant limitations related with infrastructures (creation, base costs, etc.) and with the inter-regional dimension of these operations. Another important outcome was the sharing of experiences and practices among the participating regions.

This process is going to be presented in the ESM Annual Pilot meeting, on 16 December and the respective workshop will be organised with the ESM PIlot in the beginning of 2021.

If you are interested in learning more about the work of the Co-funding and Co-Finance Task Group, please contact the Task Group coordinator José Carlos Caldeira.