Interview with Younous Omarjee, Chair of the European Parliament Committee on Regional Development — With 42 members and 38 substitute members, the European Parliament’s Committee on Regional Development (REGI) is among the institution’s largest, and is responsible for preparing legislation and scrutinising the European Commission’s work on cohesion policy. Given the variety of topics addressed by cohesion policy, the complexity of the co-decision procedure…

By Cristina Jianu, Investment for Cohesion, Growth and Inclusion Directorate, and Bernard Witkos, cabinet of Marek Opiola, ECA member — Cohesion policy is the EU’s main investment tool for promoting economic, social and territorial development. Increasing focus on the performance of cohesion policy has been on the agenda for many years, but it has gathered pace since the financial crisis in 2008, when shrinking public finances in many Member States…

For public auditors, auditing policy performance relates by and large to the effectiveness of any given policy. It involves identifying and measuring the impact of policy implementation, which most often takes place through specific programmes and projects. In cohesion policy and other policy areas, many factors come into play, which…

The launch of the NextGenerationEu initiative has added an extra dimension to the audit of EU expenditure. Not least for the national audit authorities, who not only have to cover significantly more money in their audit activities, but must also tailor their assessment procedure to the different payment conditions created…

Member States’ National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) have now been designed, submitted and approved, and the first steps have been taken to implement them. This has extended the domain public auditors have to cover, not only in terms of size but also in terms of the new disbursement criteria…

Interview with Iliana Ivanova, ECA Member and Chair of the ECA audit chamber Investment for cohesion, growth and inclusion — Cohesion funds constitute a substantial part of the EU budget. They are spent through ‘shared management’, meaning that both the European Commission and authorities in the Member States are jointly in charge of running a particular programme. Around 70% of EU programmes are funded this way, including most of the…

By Philippe Cichowlaz, French National Agency for Territorial Cohesion (ANCT) For every multiannual financial framework period, setting up the right regulatory and procedural framework, and involving all actors well in advance, already poses quite a challenge. But the situation with regard to the new cohesion policy for 2021–2027 was exacerbated…

Interview with Gašper Dovžan, State Secretary of Slovenia Cohesion policy is typically a shared-management area within the EU policy framework. The Member States’ decisions and aims at Council level are therefore most relevant. This is even truer with the advent of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), where Member States…

Cohesion was one of the drivers of the creation of the European Investment Bank (EIB) in 1958, and remains one of the Bank’s top priorities today. The Bank supports cohesion in the European Union by financing projects in regions that have a lower-than-average gross domestic product per capita and by…