AUTHORS: Jorge Núñez Ferrer – David Rinaldi – Arnd Hassel – Martin Nesbit – Andrea Illes – Kamila Paquel

As the EU starts to prepare for its next financial period, the post-2020 Multiannual Financial Framework, Europe is facing unprecedented changes which may have profound impacts on the post-2020 EU budget. It is not only the national governments of the EU Member States that will be affected but also local and regional authorities.

In order to understand the challenges and opportunities that cities and regions will likely to face in the next EU programing period, the Committee of the Regions commissioned the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS) and IEEP to assess the importance of the EU budget for local and regional authorities, to outline the potential future challenges that lay ahead of cities and regions, and to reflect on the EU budget’s future. 

Building on the identified problems and challenges the report offers a set of recommendations which have the potential to reform the post-2020 budget and offer solutions to local and regional authorities. Alongside these recommendations the report highlights that “the EU needs to continue promoting endogenous growth in its territories via modern cohesion policy, and not simply hope for some solution to present itself when socio-economic tensions become untenable. ICT advances create new forms of collaboration and the EU should experiment with them, given its social, political and territorial realities”.