european territorial cooperation central europe...

European Territorial Cooperation

CENTRAL EUROPE

Cooperating for success

Evaluation of Programme activities

2nd REPORT

SOGES spa – ERAC bv

Torino – Boxtel

Barcelona, Bologna, Bruxelles, Bucureşti, Milano, Padova, Palermo, Roma, Verbania

Amsterdam, Banská Štiavnica

September 2011

Central Europe on-going evaluation - Second report 1

Table of contents

1. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY....................................................................................................................................... 5

2. RECALL OF THE METHODOLOGY ........................................................................................................................ 7

2.1. CE RELEVANCE, CONSISTENCY AND EFFECTIVENESS ...................................................................................................... 7 2.2. PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT .................................................................................................................................. 7 2.3. STAKEHOLDERS INVOLVED ...................................................................................................................................... 8

2.3.1. Interviews with management bodies.......................................................................................................... 9 2.3.2. Overview of the sample projects................................................................................................................. 9 2.3.3. Disclaimer on the NUTS interpretation. .................................................................................................... 16

3. ASSESSMENT OF THE RELEVANCE, EFFECTIVENESS AND CONSISTENCY OF THE CE PROGRAMME ....................16

3.1. RELEVANCE OF THE CE PROGRAMME ..................................................................................................................... 16 3.1.1. The CE Programme and the changing context [EQ1]................................................................................ 16 3.1.2. The role of Cooperation [EQ2]................................................................................................................... 18 3.1.3. Assessment of the synergies established and developed [EQ3]................................................................ 22

3.2. EFFECTIVENESS OF THE CE PROGRAMME [EQ4] ....................................................................................................... 24 3.2.1. Progress in programme achievements...................................................................................................... 24 3.2.2. Progress in projects achievements............................................................................................................ 25

3.3. THE DISTRIBUTION OF ACHIEVED PROGRAMME TARGETS AND OBJECTIVES [EQ5] ............................................................ 27 3.4. THE CONSISTENCY OF THE CE PROGRAMME [EQ10] ................................................................................................. 33

3.4.1. Correspondence between programme priorities and partners involvement in local sectorial Policies .... 33 3.5. THE CE PROGRAMME AREA .................................................................................................................................. 37

4. MANAGEMENT STRUCTURE OF THE CE PROGRAMME......................................................................................40

4.1. EFFICIENCY OF PROGRAMME IMPLEMENTATION [EQ7] .............................................................................................. 40 4.1.1. General view ............................................................................................................................................. 40 4.1.2. Flexibility at programme level................................................................................................................... 40 4.1.3. The revised financial plan ......................................................................................................................... 41 4.1.4. Response from the territory ...................................................................................................................... 41

4.2. EFFECTIVENESS OF PROGRAMME IMPLEMENTATION BODIES [EQ6 – EQ9]..................................................................... 44 4.2.1. Managing Authority.................................................................................................................................. 44 4.2.2. Joint Technical Secretariat ........................................................................................................................ 45 4.2.3. Audit Authority and Certifying Authority .................................................................................................. 48 4.2.4. Monitoring Committee ............................................................................................................................. 49 4.2.5. National Contact Points ............................................................................................................................ 51 4.2.6. National committees................................................................................................................................. 52

5. PROJECT IMPLEMENTATION PROCESSES [EQ8].................................................................................................54

5.1. PROJECT ASSESSMENT.......................................................................................................................................... 54 5.2. PROJECT START UP .............................................................................................................................................. 56 5.3. REPORTING REQUIREMENTS.................................................................................................................................. 56

5.3.1. Payment procedures ................................................................................................................................. 57 5.4. PROGRAMME PUBLICITY....................................................................................................................................... 58 5.5. FIRST LEVEL CONTROL SYSTEMS ............................................................................................................................. 58

6. CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS .......................................................................................................58

6.1. GENERAL OVERVIEW ON PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT ............................................................................................... 58 6.2. SUMMARY TABLE ................................................................................................................................................ 59

7. TABLES .............................................................................................................................................................65


8. SOURCES ..........................................................................................................................................................84

8.1. PROJECTS RELATED SOURCES ................................................................................................................................. 84 8.2. PROGRAMME RELATED SOURCES............................................................................................................................ 84

9. ANNEXES ..........................................................................................................................................................85

9.1. QUESTIONNAIRES FOR INTERVIEWS TO MA, AA, CA, JTS, MC, NCP AND LP ................................................................ 85


Summary of tables TABLE 1 - NUMBER OF INTERVIEWS HELD ..................................................................................................................................... 8

TABLE 2 - LIST OF INTERVIEWS TO MEMBERS OF THE MANAGING BODIES............................................................................................. 9

TABLE 3 – COMPOSITION OF PARTNERSHIP WITHIN THE PROJECT SAMPLE, IN TERMS OF THEIR POLICY MISSION......................................... 10

TABLE 4 - LIST OF INTERVIEWS TO PROJECT PARTNERS ................................................................................................................... 15

TABLE 5 – FORECAST OF JOBS CREATION IN THE PROJECT SAMPLE .................................................................................................... 18

TABLE 6 – LEGAL STATUS OF PARTNERS IN THE SAMPLE PROJECTS FROM THE 1ST

CALL.......................................................................... 20

TABLE 7 – COMPLEMENTARITIES OF CE PRIORITIES WITH OTHER EU PROGRAMMES............................................................................ 34

TABLE 8 – PROGRAMME PRIORITIES AND ALLOCATIONS ................................................................................................................. 41

TABLE 9 – RATE OF APPROVAL IN ETC TRANSNATIONAL PROGRAMMES USING THE ONE-STEP PROCEDURE............................................... 42

TABLE 10 - EVOLUTION OF STAFF MEMBERS IN THE JTS................................................................................................................. 46

TABLE 11 - RATE OF PROJECTS PASSING THE ELIGIBILITY CHECK ....................................................................................................... 54

TABLE 12 - NATIONAL/SECTORIAL POLICIES QUOTED IN THE APPLICATION FORMS OF THE SAMPLE PROJECTS ........................................... 65

TABLE 13 - MEETINGS OF THE MONITORING COMMITTEE ............................................................................................................. 67

TABLE 14 - EVENTS ORGANISED BY THE CE PROGRAMME / JTS ...................................................................................................... 68

TABLE 15 - EVENTS ATTENDED BY THE JTS ................................................................................................................................. 68

TABLE 16 - CONSULTATIONS BY NCPS AND JTS........................................................................................................................... 69

TABLE 17 - JOINT NCP-JTS MEETINGS ...................................................................................................................................... 69

TABLE 18 - NCP EVENT PARTICIPATION...................................................................................................................................... 69

TABLE 19 - DETAILS ON PARTNERS SUBMITTING PROPOSALS, PER PRIORITY AND CE REGION, DURING THE FIRST THREE CALLS ...................... 70

TABLE 20 - LEGAL STATUS OF PARTNERS SUBMITTING PROPOSALS IN THE FIRST THREE CALLS (INCL. PARTNERS OUT OF CE AREA) ................. 71

TABLE 21 - CALLS FOR PROPOSALS ........................................................................................................................................... 72

TABLE 22 - PROPOSALS PER PRIORITY/CALL................................................................................................................................. 72

TABLE 23- BUDGET COMMITTED PER PRIORITY (EXC. TA) IN 1ST

, 2ND

AND 3RD

CALLS, AS FROM THE REVISED OP (MARCH 2011) ................. 73

TABLE 24 - FINANCIAL PLAN / AS FROM THE REVISED VERSION OF OP (MARCH 2011) ........................................................................ 73

TABLE 25 - ERDF RECEIVED AND PAID ....................................................................................................................................... 74

TABLE 26 - PAYMENTS RECEIVED FROM EU COM ....................................................................................................................... 74

TABLE 27 - OUTPUT INDICATORS OF THE SAMPLE PROJECTS AS FROM REPORTS ALREADY VALIDATED ...................................................... 75

TABLE 28 - STATE OF ALLOCATIONS OF SAMPLE PROJECTS AS FROM REPORTS ALREADY VALIDATED......................................................... 81

Summary of maps

MAP 1 – NUMBER OF PARTNERS PARTICIPATING IN PROJECT PROPOSALS DURING THE FIRST THREE CALLS................................................ 28

MAP 2 - NUMBER OF PARTNERS PARTICIPATING IN PROJECT PROPOSALS SUBMITTED IN CALLS 1-3, PER MILLION INHABITANTS.................... 29

MAP 3 - NUMBER OF PRIVATE PARTNERS INVOLVED IN PROJECT PROPOSALS IN THE FIRST THREE CALLS ................................................... 30

MAP 4 - LOCATION OF LEAD PARTNERS OF PROJECTS APPROVED IN THE FIRST THREE CALLS .................................................................. 31

MAP 5 - ERDF ALLOCATED BY THE CE PROGRAMME PER INHABITANT (FIRST THREE CALLS) .................................................................. 32

MAP 6 – GDP PER CAPITA IN THE CE REGIONS (2008)................................................................................................................. 38

MAP 7 – NUMBER OF PARTNERS PARTICIPATING IN PROJECTS APPROVED IN THE FIRST 3 CALLS ............................................................. 39

MAP 8 – NUMBER OF JTS STAFF MEMBERS IN SOME ETC TRANSNATIONAL PROGRAMMES .................................................................. 48


List of acronyms used in the text

(NPP) CADSES (Neighbourhood Partnership Programme) Central Adriatic Danubian South East Space

AA Audit Authority

AF Application Form

BSR Baltic Sea Region

CA Certifying Authority

CBC Cross Border Cooperation

CE Central Europe

CIP Community Initiative Programme

EC European Commission

ENPI European Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument

EQ Evaluation Question

ERDF European Regional Development Fund

ETC European Territorial Cooperation

FLC First Level Control

FTE Full Time Equivalent

GDP Gross Domestic Product

IE Independent Evaluator

JTS Joint Technical Secretariat

LIFE+ (ENV) European Financial Tool for Environment - (Environment strand)

LP Lead Partner

MA Managing Authority

MAC Madeira Açores Canarias

MC Monitoring Committee

NCP National Contact Points

NCP / CP (equivalent) National Contact Points / Contact Points

NWE North West Europe

OP Operational Programme

PP Project Partner

PPP Public Private Partnership

SME Small and Medium Enterprises

SWOT Strength Weakness Opportunity Thread


1. Executive Summary

The second evaluation report is due to take into consideration the relevance, consistency and effectiveness

of the CE programme based on a sample of projects co-funded by the 1st

call by one side and to analyse the

programme management in terms of efficiency and effective implementation by the other. Both the issues

have been approached applying the EQ grid.

The analysis of the sample projects was based both on the Project documents cross-check and the LP and

PPs interviews has been carried out by answering to the EQ from 1 to 3 (related to the relevance) and to EQ

10 (related to the consistency): the data available through project progress reports (dated around mid-

2010) limited the use of information to adequately answer - in this report - to EQ4 and EQ5 related to the

effectiveness as more than 1 year was still missing to the closing date of the projects included in the sample

(14 out 29 approved in the 1st call). The EQ from 6 to 9, related to the efficiency of the OP implementation

and effectiveness of monitoring system, supported the analysis of the Programme Management mainly

based on the Programme stakeholders’ interviews and the minutes of the MC meetings.

The relevance of the Programme objectives is confirmed, but a large share of LP and PP in the sample

pointed out that the weaknesses highlighted by the SWOT analysis have been considered during the project

drafting stage but proved less attractive during the implementation phase (this might be the effect of a too

precise formulation of identified weakness, that is not easy to match with the project objectives) and they

declare their projects will contribute to the achievement of the Programme objectives for the selected

priority both because they are relevant for the involved territory, and because they are coherent with the

national, sectorial and regional policies.

In a 7-year programming period the relevance of the initial SWOT analysis and the consequent financial

allocation per priority demand to be permanently cross-checked. The incurred changes in the socio-

economic and policy context did not have an important effect on the projects approved in the first call for

proposals: limited availability of co-financing quota and change of partnerships are the only elements

mentioned in the analysis. The low absorption rate of Priority 2 (accessibility), along with a correspondingly

high demand for co-funding under the Priority 3 (environment) has been promptly identified during the first

two calls, this inspired the quick reallocation of resources that had been decided by the Programme and

finally adopted by the EU in July 2011. The Programme showed a successful interest in keeping the

relevance to the highest standard and made a detailed and innovative work in preparation for the strategic

projects call for proposals.

The programme invested on the involvement of private partners and the results have been extremely

positive, well beyond the original target: after three calls, 781 cofinancing statements have been signed by

private partners in the 411 project proposals received and 184 of private institutions are actively committed

in running operations, mostly in projects dealing with “innovation” and with environmental issues.

The effectiveness of a programme is strictly connected to the number of concrete opportunities offered to

public policies makers to adopt the project results and translate them into programming tools and

integrated National and regional governing actions (the sustainability of projects results is measured by the

capacity to induce marginal improvements in the ordinary strategies of the countries/regions involved). The

CE programme appears to have successfully faced this challenge, projects are committed to create synergies

with national authorities to better target the “Convergence” objective strategy and a relevant number of

cooperation agreements appear in the list of indicators aimed at by the projects. Uneven availability of

territorial based analysis may reduce the efficiency in the implementation of results at local level in some

areas. Progresses in projects achievements do not provide a solid ground for analysis, but the Programme


has quickly noticed that the original set of indicators was too static to provide useful dynamic data and thus

immediately launched a revision process bringing to the definition of a new set of indicators currently in use.

The programme has been able to receive project proposals in a balanced proportion from all over the

regions, with a limited number of notable exceptions where the intensity of participation has been notably

high (Slovenia, Bratislava).

The efficiency, in terms of involving partnerships all across the programme area has been satisfactory, with

some regions achieving better results than others, but - generally speaking - leaving behind only a limited

area, where just a reduced number of partners have been involved in the programme activities. In the initial

stage some delays occurred due to missing National regulations. Some partners claim that the

administrative procedures are too heavy and these remarks are dealt with currently, in a search for possible

simplification.

The consistency of a programme is measured by its capacity to identify priorities and objectives which are

relevant with National and regional policies. The way the CE programme described priorities and actions

during the publication of the Call for proposals seems to have met those expectations so that applicants are

not overlapping themes and approaches and they elaborated projects that are coherent with both the local

and national policies and the priorities of the Call. Only in some cases, when dealing with the preparation of

strategic projects, it’s been reported that the separation between priorities limited the possibility to target

cross-cutting issues.

In comparison to the importance and coverage of the national, regional and sectorial policies mentioned by

the projects in the application form, the progress report template tends not to give a proportionate

attention to the issue, while the final report will give more space to that. Identification of results,

consistency of results with local policies and the way results are disseminated or capitalised are not easy to

trace.

In that concerns the programme management, the passage from “Community Initiative” to “Structural

Fund” management brought significant advance in the programming approach as well as in the legislative

and normative framework that are stronger than before. The CE programme has now well defined

implementing rules that contribute to make the regulatory framework more precise and provide the

stakeholders with precise guidance. The EC role in the implementing phase is up to the expectations.

Consistently with the ERDF rules, the management structure of the CE programme consists of the Managing

Authority (MA) and the Certifying Authority (CA) hosted by the Municipality of Vienna and the Audit

Authority (AA) hosted by the Federal Chancellery of Austria. In a central supporting role to the managing

bodies, the Joint Technical Secretariat (also based in Vienna) is involved in the daily implementation of the

programme. The work of the JTS, directly connected to the previous Interreg IIIC East JTS, is widely

acknowledged as a good example throughout the ETC programmes working community. The JTS is

proactively and positively coordinating a network of National Contact Points set up in each Member State.

Generally speaking, the findings of the IE coincide with the general opinion that the CE programme is

efficiently and cleverly managed.

Negative remarks from project beneficiaries, claiming that the set of administrative rules were

overwhelming and time-demanding, have already been tackled by the JTS and the MA. A simplified

procedure for web submission of reports has been introduced and further steps are currently considered to

meet the observations coming from the field.

Finally, it must be noted that the Annual Report 2010, had not yet been approved at the time the research

for this second report was done and thus the IE could make just a quick use of it, during the final revision

stage: we apologise for any out-dated information you may still detect.


2. Recall of the methodology

2.1. CE relevance, consistency and effectiveness

The aim of the assessment of the relevance, consistency and effectiveness of the CE Programme is to analyse whether the assumptions undertaken when planning the Programme’s strategy were comprehensive, effective, concretely measurable and targeted to the involved Regions and they are still valid according to the changing context.

The relevant chapter [see chapter 3 - p. 16] is therefore meant to check:

A. The relevance, so as to understand if the Programme is still relevant in the policy context, if it is

dealing with the issues that are actually needed, if it’s helping those for whom it is intended.

The evaluation of the relevance is aimed at answering the following evaluation questions:

• EQ1: Considering the change in the regulatory, socio-economic and political context, have new needs arisen since the SWOT was conducted?

• EQ2: To what extent was cooperation necessary to achieve the effects?

• EQ3: Has the Programme in any way complemented and enhanced the effect of other related domestic policies, macro-regional strategies, pre-accession (IPA) and neighbourhood policies (ENPI)?

B. The effectiveness, so as to assess whether the CE Programme is actually having an effect, if the

foreseen objectives are being achieved, and if the actions taken are appropriate in order to obtain

an effect. Hence the relevant evaluation questions to answered are:

• EQ4: What is the Programme's progress towards the achievement of the objectives?

• EQ5: To what extent have the Programme targets and objectives been homogeneously achieved by the involved regions?

C. The consistency, in order to understand if the priority axes are complementary, not overlapping

and contributing to the objectives of the Programme and to assess whether the Programme

overlaps with other policy initiatives or Programmes. The main evaluation question related to the

assessment of the consistency is there the following:

• EQ10: To what extent do the projects deal with problems already tackled by partner country's policies (ROPs or sectorial policies)?

2.2. Programme management

The second section of the report is focused on the efficiency, to understand if the Programme is well managed, if it delivers value for money and if the time is used efficiently. Processes and the means and resources allocated/spent are compared. The analysis is therefore aimed at answering the following questions:

• EQ6: How are the Programme's resources managed compared to other ETC Programmes?


• EQ7: How effectively is the principle of partnership applied along the implementation of the projects?

• EQ8: To what extent do the management processes, from project application to payments, enable the effective implementation of the projects?

• EQ9: How effective is the Programme monitoring system?

2.3. Stakeholders involved

The results of the evaluation are mainly drawn from:

1. the desk research based on programme and project documents;

2. The interviews carried out by the IE with the MC representatives, the NCPs, the projects’ Lead partners of the sample projects and some PPs that have been selected in order to balance the geographic coverage of the interviewees, the type of interviewees and the AoI covered by the sample.

The results of the desk and field researches have been finally elaborated according to the experiences of the IE.

It is important to emphasize that, further than originally planned in the working programme and following the suggestions made by the MC, the findings are not only based on the opinion of the LPs of projects selected in the sample (Lead Partners of 14 out of the 29 projects approved in the first call), but ordinary partners of 5 projects were interviewed as well.

The selection of the projects to be interviewed was made by the JTS, on the basis of general guidelines prepared by the evaluators. All Members States of the CE region were covered by the interviews, while no Ukrainian stakeholders have been involved up to the present stage.

Table 1 - Number of interviews held

Country Monitoring

Committee NCP Lead partner

Project

partner TOTALS

Germany 1 1 4 6

Czech republic 1 1 1 3

Slovenia 1 1 2 4

Hungary 1 1 2 4

Italy 1 1 3 1 6

Slovakia 1 1 1 1 4

Poland 1 1 2 4

Austria 1 1 2 4

TOTALS 8 8 14 5 35


The evaluators could not include in the evaluation the results of the system audit and operations audit to be executed by the Audit Authority as these audits were executed in April/May 2011 and the results of this audit were not yet fully available at the time of the core research.

Finally, it must be noted that the Annual Report 2010, had not yet been approved at the time the research

for this second report was done and thus the IE could make just a quick use of it, during the final revision

stage: we apologise for any out-dated information you may still detect.

2.3.1. Interviews with management bodies

In total, 3 personal interviews and one phone interview were held with the CE programme management bodies (Audit Authority, Certifying Authority, Joint Technical Secretariat and Managing Authority) in Vienna.

Furthermore 19 project stakeholders were interviewed (14 lead partners and 5 project partners).

Table 2 - List of interviews to members of the managing bodies

Body Persons interviewed Date of interview

Type of interview

Managing authority Mrs Christiane Breznik 27 April 2011 Telephone interview

Joint Technical Secretariat

Mrs Monika Schönerklee-Grasser

Mr Luca Ferrarese

18 April 2011 Personal interview at JTS premises in Vienna

Certifying Authority Mrs Michaela Schatz 18 April 2011 Personal interview at JTS premises in Vienna

Audit Authority Mrs Susanna Rafalzik 18 April 2011 Personal interview at JTS premises in Vienna

Desk research of official programme documents supplemented the interviews. The main programme documents consulted for this chapter have been the Annual Reports 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 of the CE programme sent to the EC, minutes of 3rd, 5th and 9th MC meetings and general programme documents such as the Operational Programme, implementation manuals and the 2007 report on ex-ante evaluation.

2.3.2. Overview of the sample projects

The 14 projects selected (out of 29 approved projects in the 1st Call) in cooperation with the JTS/MA for the present report had been submitted within the 1st call for proposal and are currently in the final phase of their implementation as the activities are supposed to finish between March, 2011 and June 2012 (except Centrope Capacity project which will end in December, 2012) although application for extension are currently on-going for most of them. Only officially approved progress reports have been used for the study, so that a considerable delay is to be considered between the actual stage of implementation and the materials available for desk research.

The projects refer to all the priorities of the Programme (2 projects for the priority 1, 3 projects for the priority 2, 4 projects for the priority 3 and 5 projects for the priority 4) and the nationality of the Lead partners is consistent with the participation rate of the EU Countries in the Programme as Germany and Italy are more represented partners both as LPs and PPs.


Apart from SONORA and LABEL projects, whose partnerships (respectively 25 and 20 partners) outnumber the common range for the CE programme and for the ETC Programmes in general (but for the BSR, where the number of partners is quite often above 20); each sample project involves around 9 partners mainly from the public sector. It’s interesting to notice that, at least within the sample, Germany has been able to involve partners at regional (Länder) level more than the remaining countries, Italy is often represented by the local level while the new Member States often involve the NUTS2 level, apart from Slovakia where we observe a major involvement of technical bodies or Universities.

All partners participating in the projects within the sample have been tentatively and approximately

grouped (Table 3) into different categories focusing on their mission and the impact of their mission on regional policies; the following categories have been used:

BLUE - Public institutions with a regional/national mission, DA1

LIGHT BLUE - Public institutions with local mission, DA’s

RED - Research institutions

LIGHT RED - Associations, NGO’s

WHITE - Private institutions

Table 3 – Composition of partnership within the project sample, in terms of their policy mission

Priority 1 Priority 2 Priority 3 Priority 4 %

Public bodies with NUTS I/II mission 16% 39% 33% 10% 21%

Public bodies with local/ municipal mission 11% 9% 24% 52% 27%

Research institutions 47% 36% 26% 30% 35%

Associations 16% 11% 9% 4% 9%

Private institutions 11% 5% 9% 4% 7%

TOTAL Partners in the sample 19 44 46 50

The composition of partnership vary widely both from the point of view of political relevance, from “all public administration” (centrope_capacity) to “no public administration” (CERIM); and from the point of view of internal mission from “mostly homogeneous” (TransWaste, 4BIOMASS, CERIM, REURIS, Danube Limes) to “heterogeneous” (KASSETS, SoNoRa). A deeper analysis would need to take into consideration also the internal partnership (associate partners, local networks activated by each single partner) and the division of tasks justifying sometimes the geographically overlapping presence of cities/provinces/regions with the same status of full partners.

1 Those partners belonging to the extremely differentiated of self-denominating “developing agencies” have been

divided on the basis of their geographical coverage of their mission.


CERIM – Priority 1

CERIM – Priority 1

I3SME – Priority 1

KASSETTS – Priority 2

SoNoRa – Priority 2

ChemLog – Priority 2


REURIS – Priority 3

LABEL – Priority 3

TransWaste – Priority 3

4BIOMASS – Priority 3


UrbSpace – Priority 4

Q-AGEING – Priority 4

centrope_capacity – Priority 4

Danube Limes – Priority 4

COBRA MAN – Priority 4


Only a few projects have already produced the core outputs representing the type of action2 chosen in the AF (5% according to the available output indicators as listed in the Table 27, p. 8), mainly consisting in the development and implementation of strategy/policy documents or joint transnational tools.

Unfortunately, the indicators related to the volume of investments or the pilot actions (and the related investments) prevent a complete understanding and comparison of the achievements as no fixed units of measurements are requested. Also, the “job creation” indicator leaves some doubts as to the way it is interpreted by the project proponents. The summary table of Output indicators shows – generally speaking – that the operations are facing some difficulties in reaching the targets set at the time they submitted the work plan. The declarations contained in the reports tend to minimise the effect of delays, confirming the partnership commitment to achieve the results originally foreseen. Latest reports available to the IE are referring to the period between February and May 2010 (only in two cases the fourth report was already approved: ChemLog and Kassetts, reporting up to September-October 2010), as the reports due to be submitted later than that are not yet validated. In the opinion of the IE, it may be worth going deeper into the analysis of the gap between submission of report, revision, submission of revisions and payment – and this may be considered as a specific issue for investigation during the preparation of the third report.

As far as the financial overview is concerned, the average ERDF budget for the sample projects is 2.6 M€ compared to the overall average for that call of 2.3 M€ and the average consumption rate at the time of drafting the report was 28% (see Table 28): almost all the progress reports confirm that the financial delays will be recovered within the end of the projects as they’re due to bureaucratic burdens and slow start-up of the financial progress. The special delay occurred in the organisation of the Italian FLC system is mentioned in some cases as the origin of those delays and, if this is true, the projects should quickly recover and a relatively higher spending rate should be detectable in the next reporting period.

The degree of representativeness of the sample is quite high, within the 1st Call approved projects universe:

# projects # partners # ERDF (k€)

Sample 14 161 36.908

1st Call 29 334 66.457

According to the methodology agreed within the 1st report, all the LPs of the sample have been contacted

for being interviewed3; the interviews took place in the period between May30th and June 6th.

Immediately after, following the requests of the Monitoring Committee to widen the coverage of the

interviews and the type of partners, 5 more project partners have been contacted from the REURIS, CERIM,

Q-AGEING and SONORA projects. The following Table 4 sums up the interviews held.

2 Joint transnational strategy and action plan, transnational tool development, joint management established,

investment preparation, pilot actions

3 The Lead partner of I3SME project was not available at the time of drafting this text


Table 4 - List of interviews to project partners

Project Country Role in the project Interviewer Interviewee Date COBRAMAN Lead partner

PL Contact Person City of Bydgoszcz

Magdalena Belof

Ms. Hanna Lewandowska

31.05.2011

REURIS Lead partner

PL Project Manager Central Mining Institute

Magdalena Belof

Mr. Leszek Trząsk

30.05.2011

REURIS Project partner

CZ Financial and project manager City of Pilsen (Partner)

Daniel Svoboda

Ing. Eva Brejchová 03/06/2011

4BIOMASS Lead partner

DE Project Coordinator FNR Agency for Renewable Resources Germany

Kathleen Toepel

Ms. Claudia Lutsyuk 01.06.2011

CENTROPE-CAPACITY Lead partner

AT Contact Person, Project Manager in LP City of Vienna

Kathleen Toepel

Mr. Paul Grohmann 10.06.2011

CERIM Lead partner

DE Project Coordinator PVA - MV AG

Kathleen Toepel

Mr. Rüdiger Werp 01.06.2011

CERIM Project partner

SK coordinator of scientific activities The University of Žilina

Michal Pálka

Dipl. Ing Michal Janovčík, PhD.

02.6.2011

CHEMLOG Lead partner

DE Project Coordinator Ministry for Economy and Labour of Saxony-Anhalt

Kathleen Toepel

Daniela Bergelt 01.06.2011

DANUBE Limes

HU Project Coordinator National Office of Cultural Heritage

Mihaly Komornoki

Ms. Judit Saád 01.06.2011

LABEL Lead partner

DE Project Coordinator Saxonian State Ministry of the Interior

Kathleen Toepel

Mr. Andreas Kühl 07.06.2011

TransWaste Lead partner

AT

Project Coordinator University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Science, Institute of Waste Management

Kathleen Toepel

Mrs. Gudrun Obersteiner

30.05.2011

UrbSpace Lead partner

SK

LP Project manager / Coordinator, Regional Environmental Center, Country office Slovakia

Michal Pálka

Ms. Zuzana Hudeková

20.5.2011

Q-AGEING Project partner

HU Local Government & Municipality of District 11 of Budapest, Újbuda

Mihaly Komornoki

Mrs. Szilvia Kelemenné Fejérpataky-Herceg

27.05.2011

Q-AGEING Lead partner

SI Municipality of Maribor Rosanna Losasso

Ms L. Zorko and Ms M. Karničnik"

10.06.2011

KASSETTS Lead partner

IT Institute for Transport and Logistics Foundation

Rosanna Losasso

Mr. Alberto Preti 01.06.2011


Project Country Role in the project Interviewer Interviewee Date SONORA Project partner

SI Luka Koper, Port and Logistic System Partner

Rosanna Losasso

Mr. Miha Kalcic 03.06.2011

SONORA Lead partner

IT Lead Partner Project coordinator Veneto Region

Rosanna Losasso

Mr.Maratini 03.06.2011

SONORA Project partner

CZ

Project manager Central Bohemia Region, Department of Regional Development

Daniel Svoboda

Mgr. Lucie Linkova 09.06.2011

2.3.3. Disclaimer on the NUTS interpretation.

Germany and Slovenia NUTS classification differ slightly from the remaining programme countries. In Germany the NUTS2 level refer to units staying below the “Länder” level (formally NUTS 1) and in Slovenia NUTS2 (Western and Eastern Slovenia) were introduced at a later stage. For the sake of easier approach of the readers, the usual CE programme map that is already familiar to programme users has been used for reporting statistical data and - in that sense - whenever “regional” or “NUTS”” data are mentioned German NUTS2 have been gathered under: Bayern, Baden-Württemberg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Brandenburg, Berlin, Sachsen, Sachsen-Anhalt, Thüringen and Slovenia has been considered as a unique area.

3. Assessment of the relevance, effectiveness and consistency of the CE Programme

3.1. Relevance of the CE Programme

3.1.1. The CE Programme and the changing context [EQ1]

Although the socio-economic crisis affected the CE Programme area as for the partners’ involvement

and co-financing, the bottlenecks have been smoothly solved through some adjustments of the revised

Operational Programme and the solutions proposed by the Managing Authority. Flexibility has been a

major strength of the CE Programme and no further changes are requested in the short run.

The socio-economic and political context has deeply changed since the SWOT analysis laying the basis of the Programme was conducted.

The world crisis has seriously hit the EU economy, pushing the Member States to reorganize their own budget and the allocation to national priorities, as well as to reorganise their internal administrative structure. The roof to overspending imposed by the Stability and Growth Pact is plugging the national, regional and local budgets, with a direct impact on employment rates within both the public and the private sector. Stronger synergies among the available funds and the actors are searched for and “regulation” is the keyword of EU national, regional and local authorities.

The financial impact of the world crises is without any doubt the major factor influencing the socio-economic environment in which partner are operating, affecting the implementation progress of the Programme and its projects; times and again the co-financing is being reconsidered, reduced or delayed in being allocated. This statement is confirmed by all the interviewees and the MA reported that problems caused by difficulties in the cash flow management (no pre-financing is foreseen by the ETC Programme)


resulted in several changes in the partnership composition, but this was solved smoothly, through the special care of the JTS in coordination with the MA. Eurostat data giving evidence of the impact of the crises (regional GDP 2009) at regional level are not yet homogeneously available at the time the IE is doing the research, so that a specific focus on the issue should be postponed.

Nevertheless, ETC programmes are meant to develop long-term structural changes through transnational approaches, tools and policies aimed at making the most of the existing knowledge and achievements in order to test or shape future strategies, so no immediate change of the OP may be dictated by the crises as no impact of the programme is expected in the short run. It may be relevant, on the contrary, that some projects decided to revise or re-formulate their work plan, when facing with an issue directly affected by the crises.

According to the findings of the present evaluation, the CE Programme is able to produce and is actually producing the structural tools (this is the most commonly achieved output indicated by projects) that decision makers will use in order to face the challenges of the world crises itself. Enhanced transnational cooperation and strengthened networks (public/public, private/private or public/private) within a single country are creating synergies among the existing resources and increasing the background knowledge needed to tackle current problems.

The main crises-related immediate effect being unemployment, it’s interesting to observe that 8 out of 14 projects openly commit themselves to create employment, namely up to 391 jobs within the end of the activities. Although the number is not so great in absolute value, it will be interesting to check – at the end of the projects activities – if the jobs created will be permanent and sustainable. In Table 5 a summary is reported about the job creation expectations of the projects included in the sample. It is not possible to compare those data with any specific economic benchmark, but it is remarkable the fact that two projects such as I3SME and CHEMLOG are aiming at creating employment with a relatively limited amount of investment.

As far as the objectives and the priorities are concerned, the Programme is still answering the major problems of the CE area, even in a changing socio-economic reality. Main trends have been foreseen within the Operational Programme, whose flexibility ensured that just some minor adjustments were necessary. By the financial allocation point of view, the major change aimed at meeting the rising needs for the financial allocation available to Priority 3 in line with the growing attention to climate change, energy-related and environment issues: funds for that have been moved from less attended Priority 2 and no further changes are considered appropriate. Nevertheless, flexibility being the result of compromises among Member States’ different interests, it should be supported by analysis developed on territorial basis which are the baseline for implementing regional policies4.

The project proposals evaluation includes the assessment of the way they foresee to tackle the weaknesses identified in the programme SWOT analysis. In fact, the sample of interviewed people uniformly admits that it is easier to build on the comparative advantages than to take actions to tackle the weaknesses.

The creation of a stable EU operational network of logistics brokers supplying ICT services (project KASSETTS), supporting manufacturing SMEs to better organise their transport demand and better exploit logistics supply is contributing towards facing ICT-infrastructures weaknesses and filling regional and national disparities which are decreasing the economic potential in peripheral, urban and rural areas.

Economic disparities, neglected infrastructures and physical barriers are being reduced through the results of the Sonora and Centrope Capacity projects, by means of multilateral consortia of external experts

4 Interview held on May, 24th, with the Italian Member of the Monitoring Committee.


overcoming the institutional diversity of the region and ensuring cohesion of the governance framework and by improving institutional dialogue across different categories of stakeholders.

The training courses organised within the Cobraman project and the Ageing Resource Centre planned by the Q-ageing project are increasing the competences of new science and engineering graduates and increasing the participation of the CE area in life-long learning programmes while improving the quality of natural assets. This weakness is being overcome as well through the results of the Label and Transwaste projects even though the overall impact should be evaluated on the long term once the pilot activities have been completely implemented.

The infrastructure needs assessment tool developed by the Centrope Capacity project, as well as the recommendations for developing logistical centres for intermodal transport and their integration into infrastructure planning drafted within the Chemlog project are contributing towards reducing the existing lags in highly developed transport infrastructures at a moment when the impact of the economic crisis is narrowing down the average national investments.

The IE therefore assumes that the Programme is still relevant and reports that some interviewees suggest that, should changes occur, a bottom-up approach should be adopted to modify the objectives, taking stock from the results of the on-going projects.

Table 5 – Forecast of jobs creation in the project sample

Project Total budget Forecast of direct

job creation

COBRAMAN € 3.624.696 8

I3SME € 2.752.513 160

CHEMLOG € 2.120.500 100

TRANSWASTE € 3.304.528 10

Q-AGEING € 2.612.750 24

URBSPACE € 2.407.790 25

4BIOMASS € 2.409.564 50

KASSETTS € 2.488.069 14

3.1.2. The role of Cooperation [EQ2]

Transnational cooperation objective has been achieved and is supposed to go on after the project

closure according to all the partners. The CE Programme has successfully supported both transnational

and place-based cooperation while the scheduled target for private partners’ involvement has been

largely overcome. An impact assessment of this result is suggested before planning further steps

onwards. Synergies with the ENPI funds should be investigated in order to allow Ukrainian partners to

further participate in the CE Programme considering the collaboration opportunities for the

neighbouring countries.


According to all the interviewees and following the analysis of the application forms and the progress reports of the sample projects, cooperation is a necessary condition to achieve the expected results of the project, there is a common understanding that the key challenges targeted by the programme AoI’s can be more efficiently faced through a transnational approach.

Despite the existing differences among the involved Regions (see Map 6 – GDP per capita in the CE regions (2008), intensity of transnational cooperation is ranked quite high in all the analysed projects and it is supposed to go on further after the project closure. Several projects are committed to build upon existing transnational partnership and “capitalisation” is often mentioned by the Lead Partners to ensure a follow up of the partnership and the projects themselves. Among the outputs of the sample projects (Table 27, p. 75 and following with separate sheets giving summaries by priority), 10 permanent cooperation agreements out of 17 planned in the application forms have already been established and 18 permanent management structures are supposed to be created within the end of the projects.

As pointed out in the following table (Table 6), the type of partners involved in the sample projects is well balanced within all the priorities and no major inconsistencies have been detected: 79 local authorities collaborate with 57 public equivalent bodies, which are mainly representative of the technical agencies of public authorities or research institutes, 23 private institutions and 1 international organization.

Nevertheless, private/public partnership should be strengthened according to most of the beneficiaries, as there is a significant role to be played by the private sector, especially in the “innovation” (priority 1). At programme level, the objective initially set for private partners involvement has been largely overpassed, with the programme reaching an 18% percentage of private partnership in terms of numbers of institutions involved after the first three calls.


Table 6 – Legal status of partners in the sample projects from the 1st

call.

Projects Public

authority

Public equivalent

body

Private institution

International organisation

under national law

Total Partners

I3SME 2 6 1 9 Priority 1 CERIM 5 5 10

Total 2 11 6 19

ChemLog 4 3 3 10

SoNorA 14 9 2 25 Priority

2 KASSETTS 1 9 10

Total 19 21 5 45

REURIS 5 3 8

LABEL 17 3 20

TransWaste 1 2 4 7

Priority 3

4BIOMASS 1 9 1 11

Total 24 17 5 46

COBRA MAN 6 2 1 9

Q-AGEING 6 1 2 9

UrbSpace 6 2 4 1 13

Danube Limes 4 3 7

Priority 4

centrope_capacity 12 12

Total 34 8 7 1 50

Grand Total

79 57 23 1 160

Considering the importance of EU borders both for the EU as a whole and for the CE Programme area in particular, Ukraine is considered to be an interesting potential partner according to most of the MC members but the actual participation of UA representatives and partners is hampered by the fact there is no ERDF fund available for expenditure out of the EU borders.

The IE assumes that an effective cooperation with Ukraine could benefit to the strategic spin-off effects of the Programme towards the ENPI area and there may be important synergies to activate with the “Eastern Partnership”. The ChemLog reports clearly state that improving connections and free flow of goods between EU, Russia and Ukraine are peculiarly relevant to the problems faced by the operation.

Beside the fact that widely spread partnerships in transnational cooperation (extended network) is in itself a basic pre-requirement for the projects submitted and eventually co-funded by the CE programme, it’s interesting to notice that also place-based partnerships (local network) have been established and strengthened as well: local/regional authorities, private bodies and universities are urged to collaborate and exchange information and they answered to the call. The project activities often look for academic support in the analysis phase (research focused institutions represent between one fourth and one half of project partners, in the sample) and decision makers are involved in assessing the results according to the


specific expectations of the represented authority, in this case the Programme acts as a facilitator of a better, direct interaction of research and policies.

This result confirms at the same time the relevance of the objectives by the point of view of the involved partners and the relevance of the approach adopted by the CE Programme, that has improved multi-level governance: an overall goal of ETC Programmes.

The intensity of both these kinds of cooperation depends on the priorities - transnational partnership is a cornerstone when it comes to environmental and transport issues while projects dealing with innovation and social issues are using the opportunity to strengthen stakeholders cooperation within their closer reach and then add the value of transnational cooperation by exchanging experiences and looking for shared solutions to common problems.

Figure 1 – Different models of transnational partnerships

The graphic representation in Figure 1 shows the two models of partnership referred above: on the left, local networks of actors that are often similar in composition and more often geographically and even institutionally overlapping use the opportunity of transnational cooperation to exchange information and find common solutions to local problems; on the right, similar partners lying along the same transport corridor (for example), or water catchment area or enlarged regions, cooperate to face the same problem, giving local solutions within a common larger framework. See this as it happens in REURIS and Q-AGEING (municipal level partners dealing with local solutions) opposite to cases like SoNoRa (transport corridor) / LABEL (river basin area) / centrope_capacity (super-regional transnational area) showing a composition of partnership similar to the right model.


3.1.3. Assessment of the synergies established and developed [EQ3]

The complementarity with and enhancement of domestic and EU policies depend on an efficient

knowledge management strategy ensuring that the Programme implementing bodies forward the

project results to the regional and EU decision makers.

The system of National Contact Points should be maintained in a new CE programme and there is room

to increase the role of the NCPs as animators of local networks granting a bilateral flow of information

to/from projects and policy makers, depending on actual fund allocation. The number of joint NCP-JTS

meetings should be increased and progressively focused on dissemination of the results.

Whilst communication and dissemination activities have been efficiently performed by the Programme

through the website, dissemination of good practices in those regions where partners’ involvement has

been poorer deserves a special attention.

Furthermore, project implementation tools should allow to better trace the connections between the

project results and the targeted sectorial policies all along the project implementation history.

At this stage of the Programme, the analysis of the synergies established and developed by CE Programme with domestic policies, macro-regional strategies and the European Neighbourhood Policy cannot but being carried out at a general level. Both the analysis of project related documents (application forms and progress reports) and the interviews held with the Lead partners and partners, highlight a high synergic potential which unfortunately cannot be measured overall. On the one hand this is due to the early stage of implementation of the sample projects, preventing the synergies from being already established, on the other hand, the application form, the progress reports and the indicators contained in the first version of the project reports make it difficult for the evaluators to clearly assess and measure the synergies.

As far as the complementarities and enhancement potential of the CE Programme with domestic policies are concerned, it’s important to point out that while the OP is clearly elaborated on the basis of National strategies and the appropriateness of the exercise has been the object of the ex-ante evaluation, there are no clear signs that weak issues pinpointed in that document have been addressed later on. The projects are requested to name the relevant National policies they refer to in their action, and the list is a very impressive one, reported in the Table 12 to provide an example of the widest potential range of interests involved in the transnational cooperation programmes. The innovative results obtained by the projects in those fields should be transmitted to the bodies which are responsible for the implementation or revision of those policies.

The depth of territorial analysis is still unevenly distributed in the programme area, thus the results may achieve different impacts in different regions.

The higher the coordination among national, regional and local bodies, the stronger the impact the co-funded operations will have. Having said that, it is crucial, according to all the MC representatives and LPs, that National authorities are actively informed about the project achievements. NCP’s, witnessed during the interviews, the positive experience of a constant contact with projects, including the involvement of NCP’s themselves in the preparation of public events and dissemination of success stories. It is too bad that project partners sometimes consider their commitment towards the National Committees and the cooperation with the NCPs are concluded once the project is approved; when the projects starts, contacts become scarce and often limited to a mere demand of assistance related to administrative issues (first level control).


As EU programming is based on National and regional strategies, usually defined in the National Strategic Frameworks, the NCP’s play an important role in ensuring that that circle is closed by an appropriately organised acknowledgment and analysis of results. It is therefore crucial that resources and persons are committed correspondingly in all member states so that the NCP can actually be the “ambassadors” of the programme as the OP recommends.

Both in the old and new Member States, the enhancement of national/regional policies, as well as the sustainability of the project results (mid and long term impact), is ensured when national or, at least, regional authorities are directly involved as partners in the operation. A new model, an updated innovative system or any other project result can only be made sustainable in the long term by its integration in the public policies elaboration and by its implementation within the legislative and financial framework.

Cross-sectorial links between the Territorial Cooperation Programmes and other Programmes should be further promoted, in particular with the 7th Framework Programme and the fore coming “Horizon2020”, expected to be even larger in resources. Considering the good results achieved by most of the projects in terms of collaboration between institutions, local authorities and universities the programme seems a peculiarly promising basis to build an efficient bridge between them and allow the research projects’ results to be more easily available to SMEs thus increasing their competitiveness. Similarly, the implementation of Natura2000 network and the Biodiversity directive often rely on the ETC programmes.

The summary of the project activities reported in the CE Programme website is a very good starting point for facilitating knowledge management and the capitalisation of the results.

Despite the efforts aimed at establishing some synergies with the macro-regional strategies (especially in the framework of the Danube Strategy), the CE Programme, up to now, had to face pressing management related issues and it had not yet been able to allocate the desired amount of time to longer term strategic thinking; now that the programme is well established initial and the draft documents concerning the future programming period 2014-2020 have been publicised, the Monitoring Committee will be called to examine them and a specific meeting has already been organised in autumn 2011. It must be reported that, for that concerns the “macro-regional” approach, the closer relation with the Danube Strategy is challenged by some Member states, and a more balanced interest towards all macro-regions investing the programme area (Alpine Area, Adriatic, and Baltic) would appear more appropriate for a multiregional body in which no specific preferences should be acknowledged a preferential treatment.

The difficulties in involving Ukraine in the CE programme are not seen as an easy challenge to face and certainly not one in which a unilateral commitment may be enough; the issue is not mentioned as a top ranking concern of the CE programme, but Poland is highly committed to improve the situation.

Finally, the programme managed to involve a great number of private partners, thus attracting new complementary resources and experiences. More detailed considerations on private partners’ participation could be worth the effort of a separate study, for the time being a specific table (Table 20) is provided.


3.2. Effectiveness of the CE Programme [EQ4]

3.2.1. Progress in programme achievements

Capitalisation and cross-fertilisation actions started in 2009 and were strengthened with the strategic

call for proposal during 2010. Changes in roles and functions within the partners’ organisations are

considered one of the main bottlenecks of both the impact on regional and local policies and the

implementation of the project itself. The progress reports are often very optimistic as the results

confirm that projects faced a difficult or slow start-up but delays are overall minimized. Indicators

appeared to be a critical issue at the beginning but the MA took timely measures to limit the possible

difficulties for the Programme management

Few projects on accessibility have been submitted. A special focus should be devoted to the definition

of this AoI in the future, to find the optimal match between the expectations and needs of local

stakeholders in those sectors and the possibilities offered by a transnational cooperation programme.

On the basis of the current experiences, consider that a special care might be required to ensure a

better fine-tuning of expectations and needs expressed by the political stakeholders responsible for

“accessibility” policies at the time of drafting the new programme.

The IE assumes that, according to the current available data and the common opinion of the stakeholders involved, most of the Programme objectives will be reached and the impact at a national level is glimpsed, but too early to be analysed. At the present stage, just the first projects results may be known, assessed and disseminated to the target groups; some of those results, mainly at a political level, can be already identified:

• synergy effects are being studied, promoted and used by some National authorities to support them in better targeting “Convergence” Objective strategies;

• networks are being developed or even strengthened and, as a result, there is an increased awareness about the new challenges and the strategies/tools to tackle them. This is confirmed by the fact that (Table 27) many permanent cooperation agreements have been established, even though none of the sample projects has yet achieved the level of establishing a joint management structure.

The interaction of the Programme outputs on regional and local policies is strictly related to each single project. Even though the exchange of know-how and knowledge through transnational cooperation still remains the main factor of success for the CE projects, the results are being integrated into the local political agendas and the development of new skills (or the strengthening of existing ones) within the regional and local authorities are supported by capacity building/technical assistance actions which are also developed within the implementation of the same transnational operation. It is worth considering that cross-fertilisation and capitalisation actions use to strengthen and enlarge the impact of project results and – in that sense – the actions put in place by the MA and the JTS during 2009 and 2010, have been a positive undertaking.

At project level, changes of persons and roles within the regional and local administration(but in private institutions as well) are considered one of the risks to face in order to minimise the bottlenecks in the implementation of the projects themselves and in the transmission from results to impact on regional and local policies.

Moreover, the use of English as a working language quite often prevents a smooth flow of information and important outcomes from being properly understood and transferred. This remark is not CE-specific;


indeed it is true for all transnational cooperation areas, where a relevant number of participants (if not all, as the case of the CE and some others) are requested to communicate and work in a language different from their national one. A peculiar solution is the one given by the SudOE, where the three national languages are used at the same time.

Beside the above mentioned hinders, the effectiveness of the Programme is influenced by the following features:

• the quality of the partnership in terms of endorsement of the project objectives and activities (joint development of the project objectives and action plan);

• the territorial analysis carried out at a national level, ensuring that no legislative problems will arise during the transfer of outputs to the local level. The administrative mission or the financial capacity of local and regional authorities must be coherent with the role they play within the partnership and vice-versa;

• the active involvement of the stakeholders in charge of public policies elaboration;

• funding is available only for the implementation of pilot-scale investments.

3.2.2. Progress in projects achievements

The progress reports are often over optimistic, results reported in the numerical tables confirm that in general the projects faced a difficult or slow start-up, but comments in the standard reports tend to minimise delays and the implications of problems and institutional bottlenecks.

The use of indicators has proved to be a critical issue according to all the interviewed project partners, but it must be noted that the Programme management bodies already detected the problem and took measures to limit the possible bad impact on programme management, by setting up a new table of results indicators that are now used for reporting. In the beginning, the table of indicators was preventing the results from being properly assessed, as they did not allow to represent the results achieved in the projects in the best possible way. Not all of them are logic, some look “artificial” and partners admit spending too much time and effort to relate to them in reporting process. Also they are too general and should be more action-tailored. Quantitative indicators are not appropriate for measuring impacts, qualitative targets and indicators must be used as well. The Table 27 summarizes the state of advancement of outputs as from the data collected from the sample projects.


Figure 2 – Rate of advancement in projects achievements, measured by different approaches

The programme is roughly made by the sum of the achievements reached by the projects which are co-financed and, for the time being, the IE can only assess that there an important lag in the degree of advancement depending on the unit used to measure it. The figure above gives an idea referred to the projects belonging to the sample chosen: it takes several months to have evidences of the real state of the art. By and large, one can say that “calendar” advancement corresponds to the actual commitment of project’s resources, while the “financial” advancement corresponds to the certified amount and the degree of achievements5 of indicators may take a little bit longer to be measured and reported.

The following is a summary of achievements resulting by the approved progress reports of the projects selected in the sample, by priority:

• Priority 1

Within the priority 1 important steps towards creating favourable conditions for innovation have been put by organizing visits to world-class technology transfer organisations aimed at increasing researchers’ awareness about technology transfer and identifying research projects with commercial potential within the CERIM project. The improvement of communication and collaboration conditions between various actors from the public and private sector is being pursued by the I3SME project through a web based platform which is going to be filled in with data gathered among the SMEs. Some difficulties occurred in contacting them confirm the SWOT analysis of the CE Programme when it foresees a communication gap between local authorities and private companies. Web-based common tools (self-assessment tool, web-platforms or databases) are the main outputs of the projects and they’re used either for information gathering and data-sharing or for day-today benchmarking.

• Priority 2

Projects within priority 2 are well progressing and important results have been achieved in terms of involvement of key stakeholders and development of strategic recommendations contributing to the TEN-T network. The SWOT analysis developed (i.e. Chemlog project) have been completed through thematic

5 Percentage estimation is based on the IE appreciation of data provided in the official reports


discussion with very active stakeholders confirming the big demand for further cooperation on the long term. Several policy documents and recommendations have been drafted including technical knowledge and harmonization proposals. Both the above mentioned results (stakeholders’ involvement and technical recommendations) are contributing towards investment preparation to be funded through other programmes. ICT open platforms are increasing the cooperation and 8 feasibility studies have been already implemented concerning intermodal transport, pipelines and waterway transport. Within this priority the IE registers a wide and strategic approach in tackling the main challenges (i.e. involvement of Russia within the Policy Advisory Group of the Chemlog project or involving a strategic partnership within the Sonora project) and notices that the assessments of the state of the art prior to the pilot activities have been carried out without major bottlenecks.

• Priority 3

Despite a percentage of approved projects within the average, according to the results achieved by the sample projects, priority 3 is progressing slowly in terms of achieved outputs, particularly towards the energy related goals. This result is mainly due to the sample projects scheduled outputs (pilot actions and pilot studies) whose impact will be assessed only at the end of the project. The start-up phase of all the sample projects focused on agreeing common definitions and standardizing the existing knowledge, leading to joint methodologies or guidelines to perform the following assessments and analysis. The evaluator therefore assumes that behind the lack of common strategies and action plans for environmental protection and risk management, the lack of common understanding when tackling similar challenges represented an important bottleneck the CE programme is contributing to overcome. Despite a slow start up and soon after the common methodological agreements, all the technical/scientific working groups are hardly collaborating.

• Priority 4

The capitalisation of the territorial resources targeted by the priority 4 calls for an in depth territorial analysis and mapping and all the sample projects have carried out comparative analysis contributing towards a sound needs assessment. The sample projects confirm the main features of the priority 4 laying on the improvement of the decision making process at a political level and the importance of knowledge and training. Monitoring tools (centrope_capacity), strategic action plans or guidelines (UrbSpace) or Management Plans (Danube Limes) have been produced trying to answer the need for enhanced development strategies while trainings and knowledge sharing are the core activities of the Cobraman and Q-Ageing projects. Joint management is deeper compared to the projects submitted within the other CE programme priorities even though we assume that geographical proximity is facilitating this result. The polycentric development goal has not been completely targeted considering the sample projects available for the present evaluation while sustainable development and the improvement of the quality of life are being tackled.

3.3. The distribution of achieved Programme targets and objectives [EQ5]

Despite limited information found by the IE with regards to this evaluation question, the intensity of

participation shows a strong uniformity all over the territory of the CE area with a few notable hot

spots in Bratislava and Slovenia. With this regard it would be worth considering to introduce in the

future a positive criterion during the evaluation period that may stimulate participation of regions

facing specific criteria such for example delays in involvement or poor rate of participation.

Regions whose involvement will be lagging behind after the initial stage of the programme

implementation should be asked for hosting the programme events.


As a starting point, it may be considered that the programme achieved its original target, that is to be “appealing”: offering an instrument to citizens of the programme area and giving them the possibility to fit a portion of their local development plan into a useful tool promising to give an original contribution to local development plans. The involvement in terms of participation to the calls for proposals has been huge, roughly 3,000 project partners joined and gathered into 411 project proposals submitted in the initial 3 calls. The whole programme area, but for a limited area of Ukraine, wanted to be part of the programme and some areas showed huge interest (421 Slovenian project partners signed a declaration of intent to participate and co-fund some project proposal); the response to the call for proposals is rendered in Map 1. Following Slovenia, Italy is performing well in absolute numbers of partners joining a partnership and Emilia-Romagna‘s institutions are participating 162 times, even better appears to be the performance of western Hungarian applicant partners from Közép-Magyarország (173 partners).

Map 1 – Number of partners participating in project proposals during the first three calls

Source: Elaboration on the basis of CE information management system.

< 36

36 – 72

73 – 108

Partners participating to project proposals

submitted in the first three calls 109 – 145

Source CE database 146 – 178

421


A better evaluation of the intensity of participation is given in

Map 2 where the number of partners joining a project proposal is weighted against the population of the region; in this way one can have a better idea of the interest raised by the programme leaving beside the effect of the absolute figure of inhabitants. The intensity of participation shows a strong uniformity all over the territory of the CE programme, with a few notable hot-spots in Bratislava and in Slovenia (which has been given a different colour due to its extremely different data), followed by Burgenland (AT) and then Praha and Steiermark (AT).

For the time being, the IE found that evidences allowing to answer this [EQ5] were not enough to provide a sufficiently solid ground for analysis. The matter will be further developed within the scope of the Third Report.

Map 2 - Number of partners participating in project proposals submitted in Calls 1-3, per million inhabitants

< 42

42 – 84

85 – 130

Partners participating to project proposals, per

million inhabitant 131 – 172

Sources Eurostat; CE database 173 – 214


The participation of private partner (Errore. L'autoriferimento non è valido per un segnalibro.) is not balanced across the CE programme area, but it is difficult to make an appropriate analysis of this information unless a specific detailed survey is conducted. By now, the typology of “private partners” comprehends different categories of institutions with potentially diverging missions, from profit making companies to no-profit associations or unions.

Map 3 - Number of private partners involved in project proposals in the first three calls

< 15

16 – 30

31 – 45

Private partners participating to project proposals submitted in

the first three calls 46 – 75



There are many factors that may affect the geographical distribution of Lead Partners; the Map 4 shows that Budapest, Vienna and – most notably – the regions of Sachsen and Sachsen-Anhalt are clearly able to offer a better support to their potential project applicants. Just as an example list, this may refer to easier access to technical assistance, or the easier activation of reliable cooperation links, or to more efficient capitalisation of lessons learned from previous experience, or to a better understanding of programme objectives and efficient transfer to the local institutions.

Map 4 - Location of Lead Partners of projects approved in the first three calls

1

2

Location of Lead Partners participating to projects approved in the first 3

calls of the CE programme 3 - 4

Source CE database 5 - 6


The distribution of programme co-funding (Map 5) shows no correlation with regional GDP per capita and this is no surprise as there’s no positive bias in facilitating the participation of less developed areas, neither in the evaluation process, nor in terms of activity on the ground. The Map 5 shows the distribution of ERDF allocated in terms of inhabitants, on regional basis: differences are relevant and the extremes differ by a factor of 100.

Map 5 - ERDF allocated by the CE programme per inhabitant (first three calls)

< 2

2 – 4

4 – 6

Amount of ERDF allocated, per inhabitant during the first 3 calls of

the CE programme 6 – 8

Source Eurostat, CE database 8 – 10


3.4. The consistency of the CE Programme [EQ10]

3.4.1. Correspondence between programme priorities and partners involvement in local sectorial

Policies

There’s a general appreciation of priorities elaborated by the CE Programme. The project partners tend

to focus on positive issues and comparative analysis of the regions involved instead of assessing the

impact of the project on existing gaps and weaknesses. It would be worth modifying the progress

report template in order to provide more useful information in terms of compliance to

national/sectorial policies and leave more space for quality remarks concerning the achievement of the

general objective. This would diminish the risk to be aware of some problems only in the final report.

The Application Manual prepared by the JTS and circulated in preparation for the Call for Projects is very well structured and appreciated. It is worth acknowledging the fact that the crystal clear definition of objectives, priorities and suggested relevant actions leaves little doubt on how to focus the efforts of the partnership. The aims of the Call and of the CE Programme are peculiarly well defined and only a few partners remembered some doubts in targeting the appropriate priority when applying for funding. Even though some changes in the activities may occur during the project lifetime, the general objective of the priority is always kept as a target and provides a permanent framework for the implementation.

Nevertheless, it’s interesting to notice that according to the admission of most of the project partners interviewed, the projects have difficulties in tackling the weaknesses of the CE Programme area as outlined in the SWOT analysis of the Operational Programme. The majority of the partners interviewed confirmed that they tend to focus on the positive issues and the comparative advantages of the regions involved instead of suggesting measures to reduce the gaps identified in the programming documents.

Both the NCPs and the majority of LP/PP appreciate the effort in giving precise definition to priorities, when launching the Calls for proposals, because too broad objectives may negatively influence the homogeneous development of the project idea and the realization of the activities as well, nevertheless, in some cases cross-cutting objectives are called for, especially when the strategic projects were elaborated, bringing a wider range of challenges to the partnership.

Although a long list of National and sectorial policies are mentioned in the Application form (see the Table 12), it becomes difficult to track partial achievements during the project life as those aspects are more widely considered in the final report while the intermediate progress report template is not giving appropriate space for reporting on this subject. The progress reports are always enriched by “annexes” giving evidence of outputs achieved in the reporting period and the JTS is closely examining them so to be able to interact with the project managers and suggest further actions or investigate the need to take corrective measures to keep the project on track. On the other hand, it is still too early for drafting conclusions on this issue at programme level, as impacts of projects results are expected to be identifiable only at a later stage. For the time being, it is worth suggesting that project report may be adapted in order to invite to deeper reflections on the matter of qualitative long-term impact.

Partner show a general appreciation of priorities elaborated by the programme as it can be seen by the joint analysis of high participation rate, private partners’ involvement even beyond the expected target and the fact that all priorities attracted a high number of project partners. A detailed table of regional preferences is given in Table 19: at project proposal level, priorities 1, 3 and 4 have been preferred, but later on, looking at approved operations, the equitability of distribution is even closer. The fact priority 2 involves a minor number of partners is explained by the fact that accessibility operations usually need the direct participation of institutions covering a wide mission and territory, so that partnership are relatively


reduced, though may be even stronger in terms of political representativeness. As outlined in the OP, there a number of EU co-funded programmes offering potential synergies (or overlap) to the actions that may be partially funded through the CE Programme, a summary list of those programmes and their correspondence to the AoI of the CE Programme is given in Table 7.

Table 7 – Complementarities of CE priorities with other EU programmes

Some other synergic EU programmes

INN

OV

AT

ION

AC

CE

SSIB

ILIT

Y

EN

VIR

ON

ME

NT

CO

MP

ET

ITIV

EN

ESS

SEE

PRIORITY 1: Facilitation of Innovation and Entrepreneurship X

PRIORITY 2: Protection and Improvement of the Environment X

PRIORITY 3: Improvement of the accessibility X

PRIORITY 4: Development of transnational synergies for sustainable growth areas X

MED

Axis 1: Strengthening innovation capacities X

Axis 2: Environmental protection and promotion of a sust. territorial development X

Axis 3 : Improvement of mobility and of territorial accessibility X

Axis 4 : Promotion of a polycentric and integrated development of the Med space X

IVC

Priority 1: Innovation and the knowledge economy X

Priority 2: Environment and the risk prevention X

ALPINE SPACE

Priority 1: Competitiveness and Attractiveness X

Priority 2: Accessibility and Connectivity X

Priority 3: Environment and Risk Prevention X

ESPON 2013

Priority 1: Applied Research Territorial Development, Competitiveness and Cohesion X X X X

Priority 2: Targeted Analyses on User Demand

Priority 3: Scientific Platform and Tools X

Priority 4: Capitalisation, Ownership and Participation

Priority 5: Technical Assistance, Analytical Support and Communication

URBACT II



INN

OV

AT

ION

AC

CE

SSIB

ILIT

Y

EN

VIR

ON

ME

NT

CO

MP

ET

ITIV

EN

ESS

Cities, engines of growth and jobs X X X

Attractive and Cohesive cities X X X X

INTERACT II

Priority 1: Service development and delivery X X X X

Priority 2: Technical assistance

LEADER

Action 1:Integrated terr development strategies of a pilot nature X

Action 2: Support for cooperation between rural territories X

Action 3: Networking X

LIFE +

LIFE+ Nature & Biodiversity X

LIFE+ Environment Policy & Governance X

LIFE+ Information & Communication X

FP7

Health X

Food, Agriculture and Fisheries, Biotechnology X X

Information & communication technologies X X X

Nanosciences, nanotechnologies, materials & new production technologies

Energy X

Environment (including Climate Change) X

Transport (including aeronautics) X

Regions of Knowledge X X

Socio-economic Sciences and the Humanities X X

Space X

Security X

Coordination of Research Activities

Joint Technology Initiatives

CIP

The Entrepreneurship and Innovation Programme (EIP) X X



INN

OV

AT

ION

AC

CE

SSIB

ILIT

Y

EN

VIR

ON

ME

NT

CO

MP

ET

ITIV

EN

ESS

The Information Communication Technologies Policy Support Programme (ICT-PSP) X X X

The Intelligent Energy Europe Programme (IEE) X

MARCO POLO

Modal shifts from road to rail and waterborne systems X

Catalyst actions which promote modal shift X X

Motorways of the sea between major ports

Traffic avoidance X

Common learning actions X

DG TREN/DG MOVE

Grants in the fields of Energy and Transport X X

TEN-T programme for 2007-2013 X

Innovation (priority 1) attracted the highest number of project partners in the first three calls (around 1,200) and the reaction of regions has been positive, as we find that the top positions in terms of territories hosting partners who joined a project proposal a list of the typically economically evolved areas such as Közép-Magyarország, Bratislavský kraj, Baden-Württemberg, Lombardia, Emilia-Romagna, Piemonte and Wien. By the point of view of attracting the interest of private partners, this priority is the one that proved to be the most stimulating (see Table 20 for details), though the overall rate of success is slightly lower than in other priorities (with the exception of the second call in which Priority 4 recorded a lower success rate).

Accessibility (Priority 2) within the CE area has great potential to be a flagship sector as for developed synergies involved, but fewer projects have been submitted (approximately one third of the proposals received and concerning the remaining priorities - see Table 22) and this outcome has already been discussed and positively tackled by the MC, by proposing a shift in funds originally allocated for that priority (see the new financial plan in the following chapter). It may be the case that, in the future, a special focus will be devoted to this theme (accessibility, in all the aspects focussed by the programme) involving the crucial stakeholders at regional level so to find a closer match between the potentialities of transnational programmes and the expectations and needs of the local authorities. The priority is likely to be better targeted by the “strategic projects” approach.

Environment (Priority 3) is the thematic field within which synergies can be developed the most, because of higher level analysis for the identification of the problems and because they are targeting at less conflicting objectives. It is worth mentioning that the success of ETC approach in dealing with typically transnational environmental problems has been noted in the LIFE+ (ENV strand) programme intermediate evaluation, where the number of project proposals coming from new member states is unexpectedly low. The reduction is likely to be caused by the highest rate of co-financing offered by ETC programmes, if compared to 50% granted by LIFE+. It may be advisable that closer connections are sought with the Ministries of Environment to ensure that appropriate transfer of results occurs and maybe better synergies


are found. By the point of view of aggregating private partnership, under Priority 3 the largest number of private partners are operating (Table 20) and even an international organisation acting under national legislation decided to ask for the CE programme support.

Competitiveness (priority 4) received one fourth of the total project proposals, 22 of which have been approved and co-funded. The priority has been appreciated by the private partners and 125 private partners joined partnerships submitting proposals under these themes. The theme defined for Priority 4 allows for the widest range of interventions and projects that have been funded are facing brownfields, policies for ageing, polycentric development, multilevel governance, management of cultural heritage… thus paving the way for a set of potentially good practices in several different fields that may be later on used for capitalisation actions.

3.5. The CE programme area

The evaluation found that the CE Programme built on the experience of the previous Interreg IIIC East and the NPP CADSES, during which the whole enlargement process was managed and new member states have been integrated as full members of the programme management bodies


Map 6 – GDP per capita in the CE regions (2008)

Source: Eurostat

The 5th Cohesion Policy Report shows that the programme area cannot yet be described as a relatively homogeneous area (see Map 6), the level of development and type of problems and opportunities are still quite different in the involved regions, although the Report highlights that differences are narrowing. The transnational approach to the solution of common issues should bring a strong contribution to close the gap in terms of social, economic and territorial cohesion within a territory that is easier to manage than the area formerly covered by CADSES, once that deep changes happened in the political status of the participating countries (some countries joined the EU and some other become “candidate” countries).

The implementing bodies have been able to involve almost all regions in the CE area, though the rate of success is not homogeneous in the CE area (Valle d’Aosta (IT), Ivano-Frankivska and Volnyska (UA) have no partners at all in the active projects); JTS and NCP are actively targeting those which are less involved and this is a positive action. The poor participation of Ukraine has already been mentioned as a critical factor, especially by Polish representatives who report a stronger direct interest in establishing stronger partnership relations.

7.600 – 14.120

14.120 – 21.740

21.740 – 29.360

GDP per capita in the CE programme regions

(€/year – 2008) 29.360 – 36.980

Source Eurostat 36.980 – 44.600


The Map 7 shows the distribution of partners participating in the operations approved during the call from 1 to 3; the distribution is roughly homogeneous but for a few spots of most responsive regions (Slovenia, Wien, Emilia-Romagna and Sachsen).

Map 7 – Number of partners participating in projects approved in the first 3 calls

Source: elaboration on the basis of CE information management system

< 20

20 – 40

40 – 60

Number of partners participating to projects approved in the first 3

calls of the CE programme 60 – 80



4. Management structure of the CE programme

4.1. Efficiency of programme implementation [EQ7]

The CE Programme has without any doubt fostered cooperation and place-based approaches have been

established as well. The IE suggests for the future to introduce a classification of project partners going

beyond their legal status and taking into consideration their main mission (for example: NUTS I/II bodies,

NUTS III bodies, municipalities, research centres, associations, NGO’s, private commercial enterprise…), so to

better understand and address the target groups of potential beneficiary when project generation or

capitalisation is necessary.

Although the Programme implementing bodies have been able to involve almost all the regions in the CE

area and only a few of them are underrepresented, a special effort aimed at a higher level of project

generation and involvement in partnerships for regions whose participation is lagging behind should be

considered. A positive bias during the evaluation procedure might also be introduced, acknowledging a

special award to partnership covering specific pre-defined areas.

4.1.1. General view

The evaluation has found that the managing structure of the CE programme is functioning well and, generally speaking, the interviewed persons agree that the management of the CE programme is good and effective.

This is also proved by the current level of programme implementation, which is well advanced in both the ERDF allocation and the number of approved operations. The programme implementation by early 2011 is well on track. No important problems in the execution of the programme were encountered to-date.

The evaluation concludes that the effective functioning is to a large extent due to the previous experience of the current management bodies with previous Interreg programmes: the MA and the JTS of the CE programme had similar functions in the Interreg IIIC East programme. Also the AA and CA have had experience with similar tasks in that programme. Building upon the previous experience of these management bodies has been certainly beneficial in the start-up and execution of the CE programme.

Finally, specific EC regulations demanding that the managing bodies were not set in distant places one from the other, prevented the difficulties faced by the former CADSES programme in dealing with a JTS placed at such a huge distance from the MA.

No consideration will be made on the “communication” aspects, which will be the object of a separate evaluation exercise.

4.1.2. Flexibility at programme level

No more changes to the Operational Programme or implementing documents are found to be necessary by the interviewees. Because the priorities are broadly defined, the programme has a flexibility to react to a changing environment. The flexibility in the Operational Programme is found to be an important factor for the smooth absorption of the CE programme funds.

Recently, a change in the OP financial table (between Priority 2 and 3) has been finally approved by the EC, but the requested change is a relatively small one. The shift of resources is based on the consideration that funds from Priority 2 were not so largely requested by beneficiaries and an adaptation of the financial plan is a good management measure to be implemented in order to prevent a risk of decommitment.

A general question is posed by confirming the fact that a key issue with a typical transnational relevance, such as accessibility, is often neglected by the relevant stakeholders in the programming area who are


complaining that huge financial efforts would be necessary to face the challenges they are confronted with, while underestimating the importance of the soft accompanying measures that might be implemented through transnational cooperation. A peculiar example of such a positive approach is given by the SoNorA projects, whose promoters have been relying on the financial support of transnational cooperation for a long number of years.

No specific measure was adopted to face the unexpected financial strain in which project partners may fall due to the general - and long lasting - economic crises; it might be appropriate to see that time for reimbursement of project beneficiaries may be made as short as possible, either by improving the efficiency of the administrative checks or by reducing the time between two successive reimbursements or by allowing for reimbursement to be asked depending on the degree of advancement of the project expenditures.

4.1.3. The revised financial plan

Taking into consideration the response of partnership to the original programme proposal, the programme management, in March 2011, submitted a revised Operational Programme to the Commission. The OP has been approved by the Commission with Decision No. C(2011) 5316 def. on 25.07.2011in July 2011. The following Table 8 gives a summary of allocation per priorities.

Table 8 – Programme priorities and allocations

Community funding Total funding Co-

funding rate

ERDF allocation%

Priority 1: Facilitating innovation

50.502.215 60.846.042 0.83 21

Priority 2: Improving accessibility

49.452.879 59.581.782 0.83 20

Priority 3: Using our environment responsibly

75.172.879 90.569.734 0.83 31

Priority 4: Enhancing competitiveness and attractiveness of cities and regions

56.122.437 67.617.394 0.83 23

Technical assistance 14.760.664 19.680.885 0.75 6

Total 246.011.074 298.295.837

4.1.4. Response from the territory

The NCPs, supervised by each MS and coordinated by the JTS, have been able to generate a relatively large interest in the programme through intensive promotion actions, information events and personal consultations (see Table 14, p. 68; Table 15, p. 68; Table 16, p 69). The agreement between the MA and MS gives the JTS the task of coordinating the network of Contact Points: the main relevant promotional activities are coordinated and discussed in cooperation with the JTS when defining the plan of the future activities. Additionally, the JTS has an overview of what the Contact Points (see Table 17, p. 69) have done


through the submission of the request of reimbursement filled by each Contact Point which also contains a report of the activities done and related indicators.

The first three calls for proposals in 2008, 2009 and 2010 have attracted 411 project proposals (see Table 22, p. 71), resulting in 94 projects approved for co-funding and involving a bit more than 1,000 project partners.

The average project size is higher than what originally expected by the programme authorities, thus the final target number of projects co-funded by the programme has been reduced from 150 to 115, in the revision of the OP recently approved.

Through these calls, 82% of the ERDF budget has been committed already in the first years of programme implementation (see Table 22, Table 23, Table 24, Table 25, p. 72). This is a remarkable achievement, when compared to other EU programmes known to the evaluators.

There is a fair competition for the funds in the ordinary calls for proposals, while specific remarks on lack of competition have been raised for that concern the “strategic” projects call for proposal, when all submitted proposals have been approved under conditions for co-funding. The success rate of 23% (for the first three calls) is lower than other ETC transnational programmes (see Table 9).

Table 9 – Rate of approval in ETC transnational programmes using the one-step procedure

Programme %

Atlantic Space 33%

Baltic Sea Region 25%

Central Europe 23%

Madeira-Açores-Canarias 52%

North Sea Region 50%

Northern Periphery 55%

North-West Europe 31%

Source: elaboration on the basis of info available on web-sites and/or direct information from JTS’s.

The strategic call will add 7 more projects, while the fourth call -with a deadline in October 2011- is expected to achieve and possibly go beyond the revised programme target in terms of number of approved projects.

In total, 13% of the committed funds has already been paid out to projects by April 2011 (see Table 25, p.

74) as from data obtained by the Certifying Authority.

After the approval of the first three programme calls, the CE programme allocated 99% of the 189 M€ already committed, within the programme area. The remaining portion is distributed to partners based in Lazio (IT), Hessen and Rheinland-Pfalz (DE), Wallonie (BE) and in Romania (North-West, South-East and Bucharest regions). While the absolute value of ERDF allocated in the regions may be of small significance due to the huge variability of the NUTS 2 areas (population spans from 127,000 to 12,000,000 and GDP per capita from €6.500 to €44.600) included in the programme zone, the intensity of subsidy, expressed in


terms of € allocated per inhabitants may give a more precise vision of the intensity of the programme investment in the different territories (Map 5). From call II onwards, the 20% flexibility rule was enforced, allowing partners located within the EU but outside the CE programme area to receive ERDF co-funding; beyond the partners already mentioned above, the programme attracted resources brought in by partners from Romania and Belgium. Leaving beside the Ukrainian regions that are not eligible for direct ERDF co-funding, there’s only one region (Val d’Aosta) that is not benefitting directly from CE allocations. The remaining regions receive different contributions whose range of variability approaches a factor of 100: several regions in Poland receive 10-20 eurocent/inhabitant, while Slovenia and the Bratislava region lie around 9 - 10 €/inhabitant.

The evaluation found that the level of participation of private sector partners (184, in the first three calls) is higher than expected, and the present level of 18% is higher than in most EU programmes. Differently from other programmes CE has decided to allow the participation of private institutions, without linking it to the fulfilment of further additional conditions (e.g.: co-financing guaranteed by public bodies etc.). In order to ensure a full compliance to the EU rules on competition, targeted checks have been set in place at the moment of assessment of the project proposals in order to ensure that the de minimis rule was always taken in consideration for all kind of partners. The capacity of regions in captivating the interest of private partners is different and capital-regions (Bratislava, Praha, Vienna and Berlin) show a higher potential for investment attraction, as well as the regions including a capital (Slovenia, Közép-Magyarország, Mazowieckie); the The participation of private partner (Errore. L'autoriferimento non è valido per un segnalibro.) is not balanced across the CE programme area, but it is difficult to make an appropriate analysis of this information unless a specific detailed survey is conducted. By now, the typology of “private partners” comprehends different categories of institutions with potentially diverging missions, from profit making companies to no-profit associations or unions.

Map 3 provides a graphical evidence of the number of private project partners involved within each region. A restricted number of regions is able to involve the major share of private partners (46% of private partners signing a project proposals are based in the same 9 regions) even if it is often true that the same institution subscribe much more than just a couple of project proposals. It may be justified a special check to evaluate the reliability of private institutions committing themselves to contribute to several projects. Some ETC programmes already decided to set a limit to submission of project proposals signed by the same institution, even when they are public bodies.

The partnerships themselves give a positive confirmation of the private bodies involvement, considering their participation as fully relevant for the best implementation of the project due to their expertise and/or involvement in the territory for the management of specific topics (e.g.: waste management).


4.2. Effectiveness of programme implementation bodies [EQ6 – EQ9]

The MA and the JTS are experienced and professional and they stand as a benchmark among the ETC

programmes (EQ6).

The JTS staff number is within the average range. Regular turnover is registered and recruiting new staff has

not been a problem so far but for time needed for the selection process. The opinion towards the JTS is from

positive to very positive. The IE suggests to pay attention to the Human Resource-policy at the JTS, keeping

staff changes to a minimum and finding innovative ways to make sure that senior staff is able to serve as

long as possible in the JTS.

As for the Monitoring Committee, the IE found out that low rate of changes has favoured stability and

mutual reliability. Nevertheless, the MC has been faced by the need to tackle short-term management

issues and the time for discussion about a long-term and wider strategy (as for almost all the ETC

Programmes) has been postponed and it actually starts now, after the release of the first draft proposals for

the 2014-2020 programming period.

As far as the effectiveness of the monitoring system is concerned (EQ9), the JTS had been experiencing some

difficulties with the daily functioning of the monitoring system, but the problems have been corrected. It

remains to see that in the future the system could be more dynamic, allowing for not just storing but

improving the potentialities as an analysis tool. Besides that, a separate and specific web-based programme

common tool allowing - for example - the direct upload of administrative documents by the LP and the PP of

each project would allow easier previous check and prevent some common reporting mistakes on the

ground of the major experience or expertise put in place by LP.

4.2.1. Managing Authority

The evaluators have the impression from the conducted interviews that the MA –closely supported by the JTS- is professional and experienced in programme management. Although major changes occurred within the Managing Authority since the kick-off of the CE programme, no major bottlenecks regarding the execution of the work were notified during the interviews.

The MA and JTS work closely together, without interfering in each other tasks. Because two implementation bodies are located in the same city, the personal contact is frequent and joint meetings can be held easily. This organizational set-up seems to work well and the experience from previous Interreg programme has helped to shorten the start-up phase and has resulted in the high level of programme documents and information means.

Through the interviews it became clear that the tasks of each implementation bodies and the rules of cooperation are agreed upon, and are experienced by the interviewees to function in practice. This however was not independently verified; the systems audit to be performed by the AA should check if this impression is indeed correct.

CONTROLS

The control system used by the CE programme is set up in line with the EC regulations. Guidance from the EC in this respect was valued as very helpful by the MA. However, being a territorial cooperation programme (ETC), a number of additional procedures to the more general provisions of the ERDF had to be developed by the CE programme. This was done by the MA with close advice from the AA. Although the EC established the Interact programme with a specific role of facilitating cross-fertilization amongst ETC programmes and preventing undue loss of time to solve similar problems, the influence of that source has never been openly mentioned.


All interviewed implementation bodies agree that the procedures that are now in place are clear and workable.

With regards to the control system though, some points were raised by the beneficiaries and the MC. Although agreed that all procedures have to be in line with EC regulations, it was generally highlighted that this results in a high number of controls.

The system’s audits should reveal whether a simplification could be achieved in this field. Based on the findings of this audit, the MA will fine-tune the attempt to determine the kind of simplifications that may be implemented. This exercise is on-going at the time this report is drafted.

The evaluators agree with the notion of trying to find possible simplifications in control actions, and to avoid overlaps. Care should be taken however to not reduce the level of controls to such an extent that problems with regards to irregularities or other financial problems are likely to appear later on in the programme implementation, when corrective action cannot be taken anymore.

MONITORING SYSTEM [EQ9]

The JTS has guided the development of the programme’s monitoring system. The system is not directly known to the IE and it is based on the same software used in the Interreg IIIC East programme, improved by the implementation of the findings provided by the second level control; the same tool is used in the Alpine Space, the Baltic Space Region, the NWE and the IVC and this allows interesting synergies among the managing bodies of those programmes. Although the monitoring system provides useful management information at programme level (and is used by the JTS, NCP, MA, CA and MC), it is perceived by the project beneficiaries as the origin of a considerable administrative burden for them, due to the large amount of data and the level of details requested. Contrary to other programmes, the CE monitoring system does not request the beneficiaries to feed the data directly into the system, but data are requested through the project reports and successively fed into the system by the JTS.

Also on the programme side, the JTS has been experiencing some difficulties with the daily functioning of the monitoring system, but those bottlenecks have recently been solved. The further improvement needed would be that of transforming a tool mainly based on efficient documentation and storing capacity, into a more dynamic instrument allowing for analysis and pro-active use by the JTS and other approved users.

For the remaining programme period, there’s barely any other way to gain efficiency than to improve the support of the IT company that has designed the current system. For the future programming period, it is likely that a general revision of the IT system analysis should be performed, taking on-board the differences between an “interreg-based” procedure and the integrated programme approach demanded to new mainstream Cohesion Policy programmes. As the system presently in use is shared by some other ETC programmes, it would be advisable that a common re-examination of current bottlenecks may occur on a larger scale, keeping an eye to what might be the future requirements of the 2014-2020 programming season.

4.2.2. Joint Technical Secretariat

The number of staff at the JTS has increased gradually from 2007, to a current level of 20 people, some of which are presently on maternity leave, leading to an actual count of 16. The impression is that the present workload of the JTS can be handled with this number of people, but there is no room or flexibility to initiate more actions. The workload of the JTS was described as ‘challenging’.


Table 10 - Evolution of staff members in the JTS

Number of staff at JTS

2007 9

2008 13

2009 18

Current / 2011 16

The evaluators have furthermore found that there is a regular turnover of staff at the JTS, occasionally caused by maternity leaves. The result is changing contact persons for projects, which can affect the supporting role of the JTS towards projects. A high turnover in staff also puts a constant strain on human resources to train new staff.

Recruiting new staff has not been a problem so far thanks to a high interest in the vacant positions, but recruiting is time-consuming and takes up time of the JTS management. The position of Head of the JTS has been vacant for a few months and quickly substituted in the end of July 2011; during the Interim period the JTS has been relying upon an interim appointment of the Head of the JTS Financial Unit, who finally was nominated as Head of JTS.

FELT BY PROJECTS

Interviews within the project sample confirm the fluctuations in JTS staffing are perceived also by projects. Although in general the interviewed projects were positive or very positive about the work of the JTS, some critical remarks were raised focussing on late or conflicting answers or receiving no feedback after being asked for input.

Although the administration and reporting instructions from the JTS were rated as clear, the administrative burden imposed by the MA on projects is perceived to be excessive. This high burden results in projects seeking a lot of support from the JTS: the demand for guidance by the JTS is high. Either the JTS should therefore be better-equipped to provide the requested guidance and assistance, or the MA should revise the actual administrative load over projects.

SIZE OF JTS

In comparison with other ETC transnational programmes, or in the same region, 16 staff at the JTS lies within the average range of the larger-size JTS (see Map 8).

It is very difficult to compare the appropriateness of the JTS staffing on the basis of superficial comparison, as each programme conceives its role in a different way, communication activities may be outsourced, as well as part of the assessment effort, not to mention the fact that different programme areas request a different effort in training and support to project generation; even in managing running operations the approaches may differ significantly and the average project size is also to be taken into consideration. The Map 8 reports raw data coming either from direct information or from programmes websites and the IE may just raise the fact that there at least two different approaches to the role of the JTS in the transnational programmes and the corresponding staff number. The CE JTS size does not look unusual, within the group of programmes following a similar approach. At present, the IE reports that the position of the financial officers at the JTS has been underestimated, both in terms of numbers needed and availability


of qualified candidates, but this issue should be considered in strict relation to what later on in the report will be mentioned as a specific concern raised by project partners in that regards the apparently excessively insisting burden. A targeted “simplification” operation is currently under way in agreement between the JTS, the MA and the AA.

Towards the end of the programming period, the uncertainty of the future employment is likely to affect the number of human resources available, causing working overloads and loss of efficiency. It is recommended to pay special attention to the human resources policy and personal professional development of careers at the JTS. The issue at stake is crucial and peculiarly connected to the fact that members of the JTS of a transnational programme are individually contracted by the MA for a limited period and the improvement of their personal skills is difficult to be rewarded by a structure that - unless mayor changes occur - constantly demands the same level of professional skills. Some JTS members see their time in the JTS as a valuable stepping stone in their career plan to gain international experience and having after some years better job opportunities (this is remarked also in many job interviews) which they also successfully pursue. Due to the request of a suitable international mix of the team, personal reasons often play a role in shifting from one location to another; not unusually moving from one programme to a different programme. While this may be different in CBC programmes, where recruited JTS staff is often original from the same regions.

NETWORKING

The JTS is promoting a large number of meetings with the NCPs and they also attend a number of meetings organised by Third parties, In the first half of programme life (2007-2010) the JTS organized 23 larger scale meetings or training session, and 2 large events (kick off meeting in 2007, and the annual event 2009). In total, nearly 4,000 registered participants attended these events.

Furthermore, the JTS attended more than 30 other meetings and events in the region during which the CE programme was promoted. In addition, JTS staff attended 22 kick-off meetings of approved projects. This is a very good score in comparison to many other EU programmes (Table 14 - Table 15).

In the first three years of programme implementation, the JTS and NCP have consulted with numerous organizations or project promoters about potential applications. From the Table 16 it can be concluded that in this project preparation phase the NCPs have played a large role (with on average 100 consultation per country). The number of consultations by the JTS is lower, but with over 330 consultations in two years, still a good effort was made to advice project promoters or support the project development.

In total, partly because of nearly 1,000 personal consultations given by the JTS and NCP together, the first three calls generated a total of 411 submitted applications. The JTS organized 7 joint meetings with representatives of the NCPs. During these meetings exchange of information took place between these two managing bodies (Table 17). The overall picture demonstrates that the staff in Vienna is highly motivated and prone to move and take direct action on the ground.


Map 8 – Number of JTS staff members in some ETC transnational programmes

#

All staff figures are given without previous consideration as to their time commitment, and based on information available on the

web sites per May 2011.

4.2.3. Audit Authority and Certifying Authority

Also the Audit Authority addressed the issue of manpower shortages. At the AA a total of 4 FTE’s, each of them working on audit and control tasks of 15 EU funded programmes. This is already at this moment overflowing the AA with work, but this could become an acute problem when more projects will be running in the CE programme and the audit work regarding operations audits will increase. Given the routinely


peculiarity of the auditing tasks, it is envisageable that a larger introduction of IT tools could be achieved, thus allowing for economy of scale.

The evaluation found that the AA is experienced in EU funding programmes. The AA is a member of the network of AAs in Europe, and has initiated its own voluntary network with other Member States. These networks are useful platforms for exchange of information.

The system audit of the CE programme has been completed recently but too late for the IE to take the results into consideration in this report: therefore conclusions/recommendations on the functioning of the monitoring and control systems will be postponed.

The AA is in close contact with the MA on audit procedures and is very supportive of the institute of the Group of Auditors established in the CE programme. The AA plays a strong pro-active role in favour of other managing and control bodies, but in doing so it is very careful to secure its independent status. The evaluation found no evidence that the independence of the AA from the Federal Gov. of Austria, MA and FLC auditors is in danger.

It must be noted that the AA in its role of final responsible for the programme audit system might be the main stakeholder in the process of administrative simplification. The same office has the same role in the Alpine Space programme, where no similar complaint concerning the overwhelming administrative burden is reported.

The role of the Certifying Authority in the CE programme is not large in terms of tasks or manpower involved. One person on a part-time basis performs the functions of CA. The control by the CA is focused on a process and documents check on the project-related administration at the JTS, to avoid duplication of expenditure controls already being done by the FLC and the JTS. The time available for these tasks is 0,1 FTE, which is sufficient, and reflects the workload covered by the FLC.

AUDITS

Not many audits have taken place at the time of evaluation. Currently the JTS is supporting the AA, and the external audit company hired by the AA, with the organization of the operation audits to be held in 2011.

Although some start-up delays and problems have occurred in setting up the FLC-systems in the Member States, the systems now seems to function well. On-the-spot checks of the FLC-system have been carried out by CE programme management bodies in Slovenia and Slovakia. No major problems were identified during these checks.

The system audit of the AA in April/May 2011 will highlight other issues concerning the FLC systems.

4.2.4. Monitoring Committee

The number of meeting of the Monitoring Committee has increased gradually as the programme implementation got under way. This development corresponds to what had to be expected. On average the MC meets twice a year, although the rhythm intensified in 2010, during which 3 meetings were held (Table 13). The interviews have revealed that the MC members agree that the frequency of the meetings so far has been satisfactory. The regular and effective use of the written procedure is satisfactory and allows for a reduced number of meetings.

The involvement and level of participation of all Member States in the discussions at the MC meetings was found to be high. Reaching of consensus has not so far created a problem, and the advice of the JTS and MA are generally considered positively.

An important element for the relatively smooth and mature functioning of the committee seems to be that not many changes to the representatives attending the MC meetings have occurred. This has created


stability favouring the establishment of personal links of mutual reliability, and should continue to be strived for in the future implementation of the programme. On the other hand, personal relations, in the long-term, tend to have an undue influence on behaviours that should be dictated by inter-institutional relations, more appropriately.

The rotating chairmanship of MC meetings is positively received and the co-chairmanship of the MA secures stability of direction.

It has been noted6, that the MC lacks a wider aim or strategy as for identifying and designing programme frameworks for the area and the national delegations do not have a programmatic mandate. In general terms, as for almost all the ETC Programmes, MC are much more concentrated on the projects’ selection that on developing and making more effective global strategies at the level of the Programme areas; some transnational programmes decided to keep in place the Steering Committee, as it was recommended in the 2000-2006 programming period, and this could be an option to be considered, if the composition of the committees is significantly different.

JTS SUPPORT TO THE MC

The interviews with the MC revealed that the support of the JTS in preparation of the MC meetings is valued very positively, and just a minor remark pointed out that sometimes materials for discussions and minutes were circulated beyond the time limits set by the internal rules of procedures. MC members also actively add points to the agenda. The quality of the supporting documents and provided background information was rated as good.

The overall supporting task of the JTS towards the functions of the MC is reported to be approximately 20% of the JTS time. This is an acceptable percentage, within a division of working time which must consider the needs of the MA, the routinely monitoring tasks, the communication work and the support to beneficiaries.

Another point mentioned through the interviews, is that the topics covered in the MC meeting so far have been quite technical in nature, leaving less space for more strategic or content-related discussions. There is a demand for more content-related and strategic discussions in the MC meetings and, by the evaluators own experience, this is a recurrent issue in several programmes and highlighted during a number of years.

ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN COMMISSION IN THE MC

The relation of the CE programme with the EC was described by the interviewees to be informal and valuable, mainly in relation to the definition of geographical scope of the new CE programme. At the same time, it is clear that the same territorial based analysis on which old member states elaborated the starting ground for transnational cooperation was not available in the new member states.

The direct influence of the EC so far on the programme implementation is not large; only minor comments are received on the annual reports. This further underlines the smooth implementation and the satisfaction linked to the high absorption capacity of the CE programme.

Some minor implications have arisen from a number of changes of the desk officer for the CE programme in Brussels. Although this has not resulted in serious problems or delays, it would still be desirable to keep one and the same EC desk officer throughout the programme implementation as a stable point of contact.

6 Interview held on May, 24th, with the Italian Member of the Monitoring Committee


4.2.5. National Contact Points

All Member States participating in the CE programme have set up National Contact Points. The main task of these contact points is to provide general information about the CE programme and assist potential project promoters in the project development phase. Later on in the programme lifetime, the NCPs should have a role in disseminating the programme results. It has been mentioned that the NCPs in some countries play also a role of guidance, indicating to project partners the way to fit their ideas into the national strategies. In addition to promotion actions by the JTS, also the NCP in all Member states have organized a series of events (56 in total) or have attended other events in which the CE programme was promoted (see Table 18, p. 69). The OP insists on the fact that CP’s form part of a wider network, coordinated by the JTS and acting from support to project generation to dissemination of results and organisation of national events.

The interviews show that the network of NCP’s is presently working well, although some claim that there is some room even for widening their range of action if it would not be limited by the scarce availability of extra funds coming from the National budget.

AVAILABLE BUDGET

The NCPs receive funds by the TA budget of the programme, but the resources actually available may be increased following decisions taken at National level. The budget allocation to the NCPs is generally found to be appropriate to perform the actions requested, but not any further.

Potential beneficiaries use to be in contact with NCPs before submitting an application and the interviews confirmed that in general the role of the NCPs in providing information and organising information events is appreciated by project partners.

In particular, the added value of the NCPs in targeted partner search was highlighted by many interviewed projects. In general the interviewed partners rated the quality of the support received from the NCPs as good.

However, the nationally awarded budget determines to a large extent the actions that can be taken by the NCP. Differences between NCPs are found in this respect.

LINK WITH ‘CENTRAL’ PROGRAMME MANAGEMENT BODIES

The major effort requested to the NCPs is concentrated during the project development phase; at a later stage, once the project is approved and functioning, the link either fades away or - on the contrary - is strengthened by the need and will to better disseminate the project results. This fluctuating behaviour raises the issue of how efficiently the NCPs will be able to disseminate the results of the CE programme and how could the results achieved by the project be benchmarked and better capitalised within the relevant public policies.

In the past, a number of joint coordination meetings were held with the JTS and NCPs (Table 17). The evaluation has found that there is a desire to organize more such meetings. The focus of those meetings should however change as the programme implementation moves onwards.

Once the programme is moving from project development to producing concrete results, the topics of the joint NCP-JTS meeting should move towards dissemination of the results of the CE programme. This will require a different approach of the JTS and MA to these joint meetings.

In addition to supporting potential projects, the NCPs are providing a good information feedback loop from the regional level to the central programme level bodies, such as the MA. This flow of information is important for the correct functioning of the MA.


Flow of information between the JTS and the NCP has been rated as low at the beginning of the programme, when the experience of the previously existing CADSES Contact Points had not been completely absorbed, but later on the NCP have been integrated into the communication web coordinated by the JTS. Reactions concerning the degree of information about concerning projects approval/rejection are mixed: though the same communication protocol applies to all NCPs, in the interviews it’s been claimed that quicker and/or wider information should be made available.

The IE did not examine the internal and inter-bodies communication protocols mentioned, in this phase.

The project reports are uploaded in the internal programme network and they are accessible to NCPs; considering new reports are continuously introduced, it may make sense that the NCP may receive a specific alert via the internet (RSS feeding), to ensure immediate feedback from the operations .

NETWORKING

In larger programme areas with many different regions belonging to a number of Member States, NCPs have a role to play. Individual consultations with project applicants (in their own language) and the support of NCPs in partner search are positively valued.

The evaluators recommend strengthening the ties between the JTS and the NCPs in the current programming period. This can best be done through further joint meetings. Increasing attention should be paid to the obstacle to better dissemination of CE programme results at the national and regional level.

For the future programming period, the evaluators recommend to consider strengthening the role of NCP as promoters of a network of regional contacts and information centres. Experiences of other Interreg programmes should be taken into account and used. The exact structure of such a system should be the topic of a further investigation, potentially by the INTERACT programme.

It is worth mentioning the fact that some times the national networking is pro-actively stimulated to facilitate cross-fertilisation among projects and beneficiaries acting within the same priorities or fields of intervention, though in different transnational programmes.

4.2.6. National committees

The Member States represented in the CE programme have established national committees. These committees are made up of a large number of national and regional governmental bodies, sometimes supplemented by NGOs.

The main role of the national committee is to advise the members of the Monitoring Committee providing regional and local interpretations on the CE strategy and to assess the relevance of submitted applications. In several Member States the national committee is very active.

As a concrete evaluation question, the MC members were asked about the (future) role of the national committees. The added value of bringing in considerations from the regional and national level is recognized by the MC members. By and large, the partnership principle is felt as very important and the present advisory role is appreciated, allowing to add input from many regions, stakeholders and policy fields. The general consensus is that the role of the national committees should remain advisory in nature.

For the National Committees, no larger or different role in future decision making of the CE programme than present one was recommended by the interviewed MC members. Practical reasons were given for this, as the number of members in the national committees practically prevents a larger active or deciding role for those bodies.


MEMBER STATES

The interviews conducted show that the national level (role of Member States in CE programme) is satisfactorily organised through the MC members. The MC meetings provide a good platform to address national interests, although it has been criticised the fact that administrative and procedural issues too often take the largest share in the agenda up to now.

The rotation of the chairmanship of the MC meetings has increased the involvement of Member States in the programme; this rotation was already in place during the previous CADSES period and should be continued in the future.

The interviews did not reveal any visible differences in approach or involvement of (old and new) Member States in the CE region. Although currently there are important differences in the allocation of CE funds to the different regions (Map 5), the evaluation has found that this does not cause any concern or criticism from the Member States. This would prove that the programme is really considered a common asset whose benefits are shared all over the programming area, addressing common issues; in this sense one step forward would be represented by the fact no financial allocation table based on national identification are any more elaborated. Typical summary table giving evidence to the nationality of the LP may be substituted by tables grouping LPs on the basis of their mission (NUTS level responsibilities; research agencies; associations….), but this kind of categorisation is not present in the current CE information management system setting-up.

Finally, the Member States have delegated the implementation of the CE programme to the Managing Authority and a memorandum of understanding on the shared responsibility exists between the Member States and the MA.

UKRAINE

The role of the Ukraine as an observer in the CE programme was investigated in the evaluation. The first reason for low involvement is due to the fact ERDF funds are not available for that country; despite that, there are 7 UA partners participating in active projects. On the programme side, the communicating difficulties with the Ukrainian authorities and changing of staff at the Ukrainian side were mentioned as complicating factors. All in all, the issue of actively involving the bordering countries does not emerge as a general concern of the CE programme, but Poland is actively involved in improving the situation.

On the project side the demand is clearer and Polish PP expressed a special interest in expanding relations beyond the possibilities already offered by the ENPI CBC programme “Poland-Belarus-Ukraine”.


5. Project implementation processes [EQ8]

Project management processes are quite efficient even though there’s room for some improvements. Delays

related to the start-up phase could be overcome by establishing special transitory rules, for example in the

case in which delays in fine-tuning the National FLC regulations may have a significant impact on some

projects.

All along the project implementation, it is worth examining the cost/benefit ratio of allowing more flexibility

in terms of administrative management, so to allow them to take appropriate measures to tackle changes

either of internal or external factors affecting the achievement of their objectives. This should be compared

to the extra job requested to the implementation bodies and to the increased uncertainties at programme

expenditures management level, include a higher risk of decommitment.

Whilst CA payments schedule is very quick, the gap between PR submission and payments are causing some

problems both to private and public institutions. The IE therefore suggests analysing and matching the

results of the system audit and the on-going evaluation in order to detect feasible improvements on this

issue.

The JTS faces the issue of common mistakes made in audit certificates as one of their routine task: in a pro-

active attempt to make the management more efficient by making interpretation of relevant rules clearer,

the JTS also launched a specific networking effort including the fact a yearly meeting inviting FLC’s is

organised in Vienna and NCP’s are welcome to attend too. It may be worth suggesting the MS to establish

stricter criteria for the selection of FLC bodies, on the basis of proven experience or attendance to training

seminars. A data base of FLC bodies’ performance might also be launched at National level, so to support

the choice of those partners who are allowed to do so by their country rules.

5.1. Project assessment

In the project assessment phase, the JTS previously performs an administrative and eligibility check, resulting in the declaration of non-eligibility of a portion around 20% of proposals. In due consideration of the remarkable amount of work done to spread the relevant information concerning the programme calls for proposals, priorities and procedures, it is important to notice that those information have been positively received by the target group and the rate of rejection due to formal mistakes or because they failed to match the eligibility requirements are reduced.

Table 11 - Rate of projects passing the eligibility check

Call Applications

received Considered

eligible Rate

1 96 78 81%

2 179 137 77%

3 136 112 82%

Totals 411 324 80%


It is known that some programmes achieve much higher rate of rejection7 and the low rate is a proof of the good dissemination and information work done by the JTS and the NCP. Taking into consideration that the scope of transnational programme is that of fostering the opportunities for setting up transnational partnerships, it could be considered that the rate of rejection during the administrative eligibility check may be even reduced by allowing an extra time (within strict limits) for correction and integration of missing documents. In practical terms, this would introduce a further step, providing the project applicants an overview of missing/wrong administrative documents and allowing them a limited time to correct/provide them. Taking into consideration the total time span requested from the deadline of the call for proposals and the actual date of signature of the subsidy contract (roughly 12 months later) it may be worth to add (approximately) one month.

In the successive step, the NCPs are involved in order to confirm the legal status of the partners, this exam often involved the judgement of the juridical status (public, public-equivalent, public-controlled) and MC minutes report of the need to apply National criteria that are neither always clear nor common to all MS.

The evaluation of project proposals has been assisted by external experts in that concerns the technical component; the experts had been chosen from a roster of candidates established at the beginning of the programming period and constantly updated; the input received by the external experts has been considered valuable and no concern has been raised as regards the cost/benefit of having experts assessing such a high number of projects that will be rejected. By this point of view, a two-step procedure would have limited this, although raising some more concerns such as the longer time needed for final approval and the higher risk of decommitment. The main selection criteria used in project evaluation (relevance, partnership, implementation, outputs, sustainability and budget) seem to work well, although some members of the MC suggest there is room to identify even more focused ad hoc criteria for each priority and theme and the Interact programme may be of some help in that sense. Rejection of projects is mainly based on poor partnership or scarce relevance issues.

All interviewed sample projects were at first conditionally approved. In general, changes were requested to the budget and/or project actions, on the basis of remarks identified during the evaluation process and translated into pre-conditions to be met, validated by the MC and negotiated by the JTS with the LP. The lapse of time between submission and final approval of the sample projects analysed is comprised between 6-9 months; an additional 3 to 6 months should be added in order to ensure that project beneficiaries are fulfilling the conditions set by the MC for approval (1 month) and then for the JTS to verify compliance, prepare the subsidy contract, have it signed and sent back. The limitation of this period to the very minimum is extremely important for those public administration partners that are not allowed to open dedicated project budget lines before the legal process is completed and – in the case of project partners – this is taking even more time due to internal partnership arrangements. On this point the CE programme performance is comparable to other EU programmes based on a one-step procedure.

Some NCP openly appreciated the fact that the knowledge of the quality assessment grid is greatly helping them assisting the applicants in the fore coming calls.

Contrary to a behaviour consolidated in other DG’s and strangely enough if compared to general EU recommendations on preventing conflicts of interest, the Municipality of Vienna is at the same time the MA and a project beneficiary, through two different Departments, with relative autonomy but reporting to the same higher authority. The case is reported to happen also in the SEE programme and in other ETC programmes, most commonly in the CBC strands. A similar situation of potential conflict of interest occurs if considering that members of the MC, with a voting power (while the MA has no voting power itself), are

7 IPA Adriatic rejected 52% of 1

st call project proposals on the ground of administrative check.


asked to express their opinion on projects which the organisation they belong to are submitting: the same approach is common in ETC programmes. In the specific case of the CE programme, it is governed by an appropriate article (§ 6) of the Rules of Procedures the programme approved and implemented. Article 6 states that the MC chair is requested to ensure that MC members are free from interests dictated by personal or partners involvement and receive their spontaneous declaration of existing conflict, prior to the discussion of the critical issue. The IE points out that the solution is likely to be the best possible compromise and it is transparent, known and accepted.

5.2. Project start up

Despite the normal delays in the programme start-up and in fine-tuning the procedures, the sample interviewed did not experience significant bottlenecks. The Lead Partner training organized by the JTS just after the awarding phase seems to be working well and provide substantial help to beneficiaries. The most important items covered during these sessions are financial issues, monitoring and audit procedures and publicity rules, while little effort is given to facilitate clustering of projects within existing or potential networks connecting similar operations. CE annual event in Verona has been mentioned as a positive example of facilitating inter-projects networking and other similar events (CE Annual Events in Prague (2010), during Eurasia in Leipzig (2010) and the Innovation Congress in Stuttgart (2010)) are mentioned in interviews.

Not many questions are raised by projects concerning the implementation manual and other guidance documents provided by the programme. In one case, it has been noted that the amount of manuals and other supporting material already achieved an impressive 600 pages.

There is quite a regular contact between approved projects and the JTS during the initial project phases. The questions raised by LP’s mainly concern questions about eligibility of expenditures, visibility rules and some confirmation requests from lead partners about reporting issues.

5.3. Reporting requirements

All projects agree that the reporting requirement and reporting instructions are clear, and assistance from the JTS is received in case of questions. The interviewed projects are generally positive about the support from the JTS, although some differences are found based on individual examples.

However, the general consensus is that the reporting template is not practical. The template combines the progress and financial report, which makes it difficult for two people to work on the reporting at the same time. Also, some general MS Word-functions cannot be applied to the MS Excel-template, making the reporting time-consuming.

Furthermore, the interviewed projects strongly express their opinion that the expenditures eligibility criteria and financial controls connected to the reporting of the CE programme are too detailed and too strictly applied. Projects are allowed to make minor changes (within the limits set by the Implementation Manual), while they must seek contact with the JTS in all cases concerning major project changes, both in budgetary and activity measures, and those changes will involve the approval of MC and MA. The projects’ comments on limited room for flexibility in the interpretations of rules should be counterbalanced by informing about the direct consequences caused by too frequent project changes in terms of working overload of the managing bodies.

The general impression given by the interviewed projects is that in the CE programme control procedures appear to be more scrupulously accurate than in other similar programmes, including the one that is managed under the same Audit Authority (Alpine Space). This is likely to be a result of the interpretation given by the CE programme managing bodies to the requirements of the management and control systems


set in art. 71 of Regulation EC 1083/2006 and setting easier-to-check requirements concerning the financial/administrative performances than those requested for the quality check of results achieved. On the other hand, it is understood that the JTS applies also a comprehensive check on the quality of the content-related outputs and it does its best to “understand” the progress reports and the annexes in order to interact positively with the Lead Partner and help them in the best project management.

Also, the continuous call to a strict adherence to programme rules is hampering project implementation (especially during these critical years). The projects Lead Partners express their frustration with having to spend a lot of time for financial management (reporting and administration); while this time spent on project administrative management sometimes negatively affects the project implementation.

The interviewees generally agree that the administrative burden of the CE programme is rather high if compared to their experience and some experienced LP even rates it as considerably higher than in other EU programmes. Apparently, a better compromise is identifiable, balancing the highest consideration deserved by the use of public funds and the importance to ensure the beneficiary the smooth utilisation of allocated co-financement in order to achieve the long-term goals standing at the base of the programme itself.

5.3.1. Payment procedures

In case a project report is not complete or does not contain accurate information, the LP is asked to provide clarifications or complete the information within a fixed deadline, after which the JTS will continue the examination the report. This can lead to some larger delays, depending on the nature of the problem. Usually, LP should simply consolidate by aggregation the reports coming from FLC certificates provided by partners, but times and again it happens that JTS requests for clarifications oblige the Lead Partners to refer back to project partners or to FLC-bodies that have caused the problems. Considering that the JTS is requested by the OP to prepare and provide the MA, the AA and the CA all necessary information to allow the fulfilment of their responsibilities, but JTS staff, though not performing a “higher-level” audit sometimes detect misinterpretation of programme rules leading to audit certificates that - though correct form the National and legal point of view - are not acceptable. This fact leads to requests for clarifications and possibly to the issue of a new correct audit certificate extending the time for reimbursement. The fact of mistakes or incompleteness leading to the rejection of the financial report reveals that there are cases in which the FLC-bodies are not appropriately implementing the programme rules. While the role of the AA is that of an external check of the whole system, its appropriateness and its correct implementation, the JTS is actively involved in networking with FLC bodies at National level and once a year a general meeting is called, during which the rules are made clear and common mistakes explained to the newcomers.

Many interviewed beneficiaries state that the time gap between a payment request and receiving of ERDF funding is causing problems for both private and public institutions in some Member States. A partial reduction of this problem would be to establish a monitoring system that allows on-line remote check of the administrative documents uploaded by each partner; the IT solution is technically available.

The control done by the CA related to payment requests is focused on a process and document check, to avoid duplication of expenditure controls already done by the FLC and the JTS. This is a logical arrangement.

Once a payment request is approved by the JTS, the MA and the CA, the payments will be made to the Lead Partner. After the report is accepted by the JTS, the payment of ERDF funds to projects (see Table 25) by the Certifying Authority is handled within 7-10 working days. This may be considered a smart performance.

No liquidity problems at the CA have occurred so far, preventing the CA from making payments; the pre-financing by the EC is organized well through an automatic system. The 22 M€ received in the first three years of implementation from the EC corresponds to 9% of the total ERDF contribution to the CE programme (see Table 26 for details).


5.4. Programme publicity

Although not a specific topic of this evaluation (but covered by a separate evaluation) the interviews conducted in this evaluation found that the publicity means of the CE programme are rated as very good. This is also recognized by the EC that has designated the publicity effort of the CE programme as a best practice.

5.5. First Level Control systems

The functioning of the FLC-system differs between Member States, and that is causing LPs some administrative problems. Some of the nationally centralised FLC-systems need a lot of time for verifying expenditure; in some cases, delays of up to one year were reported by Lead Partners.

In the beginning of the programme period, some Members States had not yet finished the FLC-system arrangements resulting in delays in verifying expenditure of some partners. This is now solved, but it has caused undue additional administrative problems for projects approved in the first call.

Some LPs on occasion report different approaches or interpretation of rules between the JTS and the FLC and all projects agree that in general the FLC system now in place in the CE programme is causing them a considerable administrative burden.

Most comments of the interviewed projects relate to the centralized FLC-systems; the reported experience is that the de-centralised FLC-system chosen by some Member States functions quicker.

Presently the JTS has put forward proposals to simplify the reporting procedures by allowing electronic formats for reporting documents. This will lessen the administrative burden for projects.

6. Conclusions and recommendations

6.1. General overview on programme management

The management structure of the CE programme is functioning well. All bodies involved in the programme management of the CE programme work on a professional level and cooperation between the institutions is good. The JTS of the CE programme is widely considered one of the best performing reference point within the informal “Interreg” community.

At this stage the impact of the project results is negligible, as expected; but it is worth mentioning the fact that CADSES’s project results are coming out in this programming period and many of the outputs and results of the CADSES Programme (feasibility studies, especially on environmental issue etc.) are being used now to support projects, programmes, plans and policies.

The implementation of the CE programme is well on track. The objectives of the programme appear to be achievable by the current programme management structure.

On the other hand, projects feel a high administrative burden by participating in the CE programme. This administrative burden is negatively affecting the implementation of projects and the quality of outputs of approved projects.

This is a serious bottleneck which – if not reduced - will have an effect on the achievement of the programme indicators. The JTS reported that steps towards a “simplification” aiming at lessening the administrative burden are already undergoing, under the guidance and responsibility of the Audit Authority. The IE has evidence of it in the simplified version of the progress report (introduced from PR4 of


call 1 projects as well as in the Implementation Manual already approved by the MC - simplified procedure for the submission of reports).

6.2. Summary table

The programme already launched its fourth and final call for proposals and it will not be possible to change most of the rules already enforceable, so there are limited issues likely to be influenced by recommendations that can be reasonably taken into consideration within the present programming season.

Conclusions Recommendations

EQ1: Considering the change in the regulatory, socio-

economic and political context, have new needs arisen

since the SWOT was conducted? [Chapter 3.1.1]

The financial impact of the world crises is the major factor influencing the socio-economic environment in which partners are operating. Changes in the partnership related to this situation have been smoothly solved by the MA of the CE Programme.

No major recommendation.

There’s a general appreciation of priorities elaborated by the CE Programme. The project partners tend to focus on positive issues and comparative analysis of the regions involved instead of assessing the impact of the project on existing gaps and weaknesses.

Progress reports might contain a special section in which specific information about dealing with weaknesses identified are dealt with.

The Operational Programme has been revised recently and approved. Its flexibility is ensuring minor adjustments are possible, if needed, to meet new small changes originated by changing needs.


EQ2: To what extent was cooperation necessary to

achieve the effects? [Chapter 3.1.2]

Transnational cooperation is ranked quite high in all the analysed projects and it’s supposed to go on after the project closure.


The Programme objective for private partners’ involvement has been largely overcome.

Given the great initial success of private partners involvement, consider studying the results and impact of this fact before making further efforts

Ukraine is an interesting potential partner but lack of fund is hampering down its involvement.

See if specific allocation of ENPI funds may be made in favour of Ukrainian partners willing to participate in the CE programme.



EQ3: Has the Programme in any way complemented

and enhanced the effect of other related domestic

policies, macro-regional strategies, pre-accession (IPA)

and neighbourhood policies (ENPI)? [Chapter 3.1.3]

A synergic potential has been detected but it cannot be assessed at the moment.


The impact and the synergy with domestic policies of the expected results depend on the possibility for the Programme implementing bodies to forward them to the bodies responsible for the implementation of regional policies.

The system of National Contacts Point should be maintained in a new CE programme. There is room to increase the role of the NCPs as animators of local networks granting a bilateral flow of information to/from projects and policy makers, depending on actual fund allocation.

While lots of attention has been given to certify the appropriate use of funds and external auditors are compulsorily requested to certify the expenditures, it may be equally relevant to ask projects to implement an external evaluation and this would help keeping the whole programme on track for that concerns the expected impact on local policies.

Focus a special attention to dissemination of good practices and programme results in those areas where partners’ involvement in the programme has been poorer.

Confirm the advisory role of the NCPs and support them in the appropriate use of the project proposals evaluation in order to improve the quality of projects and to prevent duplication.

Increase the number of joint NCP-JTS meetings, and shift the focus gradually to dissemination of programme results.

Synergies with the Danube macro-regional strategy have been highlighted but the Programme covers an area influenced by several macro-regional strategies.


EQ4: What is the Programme's progress towards the

achievement of the objectives? [Chapter 3.2]

Capitalisation and cross-fertilisation actions had been started since 2009 and the launch of the strategic projects call for proposal during 2010 is offering a concrete step forward in this direction.




Changes in the regional and local administration are considered one of the main bottlenecks of both the impact on regional and local policies and the implementation of the project itself.


The progress reports are often very optimistic as the results confirm that projects faced a difficult or slow start-up but delays are overall minimized.


Indicators appeared to be are a critical issue at the beginning but the MA took timely measures to limit the possible difficulties for the bad impact on Programme management


Less projects than expected have been submitted on accessibility.

A special focus should be devoted to the definition of this AoI in the future, to find the optimal match between the expectations and needs of local stakeholders in those sectors and the possibilities offered by a transnational cooperation programme.

Consider that a special care might be required to ensure a better fine-tuning of expectations and needs expressed by the political stakeholders responsible for “accessibility” policies at the time of drafting the new programme.

EQ5: To what extent have the Programme targets and

objectives been homogeneously achieved by the

involved regions? [Chapter 3.3]

The intensity of participation covers evenly the whole territory of the CE area with a few notable hot spots in Bratislava and Slovenia.

Consider setting a maximum limit to the number of partnership commitment the same institution may subscribe as the participation beyond the managing capacity may result in weak project management and poor possibility to transfer project results into local policies.

The Implementing bodies have been able to involve almost all the regions in the CE area. Only a few of them are underrepresented.

Consider (in the future programming period) the introduction of a positive criterion during the evaluation period that may stimulate participation of regions facing specific criteria such for example delays in involvement or poor rate of participation.

Consider to pay a special attention to regions whose involvement will be lagging behind after the initial stage of the programme implementation, for example, by asking them to host the programme events.



The Programme being made by the sum of achievements reached by the projects which are co-financed, the IE found limited information to elaborate on this issue for the time being.


EQ6: How are the Programme's resources managed

compared to other ETC Programmes? [Chapters 4.2]

The MA and the JTS are experienced and professional. No major recommendation.

Compared to other ETC transnational programmes, the JTS staff is within the average range. Regular turnover is registered and recruiting new staff has not been a problem so far, but for the time needed for the selection process.

Pay attention to the Human Resource-policy at the JTS, keeping staff changes to a minimum, finding innovative ways to make sure that senior staff is able to serve as long as possible in the JTS.

The turnover is felt by projects, even though the opinion towards the JTS is from positive to very positive.

Difficulties in communication perceived by beneficiaries when natural maternity leaves occur may be reduced nominating a back-stopping officer for each project.

Low changes within the Monitoring Committee favoured stability and mutual reliability.


Monitoring Committee meetings sometimes cannot be satisfactorily prepared because of late circulation of working documents.

JTS should take appropriate measures to provide the MC members with documents to be analysed and discussed during the MC meetings in due time and - as far as possible - in one unique package, imposing penalties to Third Parties in the case they are responsible. A similar effort should be made to provide minutes of the meetings in due time.

The MC had no time to share a wider strategy as for almost all the ETC Programmes, their core aim being projects’ selection and just a few strategic or content-related discussions. A change in priorities is foreseen in the near future, as the draft documents concerning the new programming season are made available by the EU.

Plan more time at MC meetings for more strategic discussion and more project content-related topics, as it has been reported to increasingly happen during the latest year programme management bodies meetings.

EQ7: How effectively is the principle of partnership

applied along the implementation of the projects?

[Chapter 4.1]

The approach to cooperation depends on the priorities and place-based partnerships as well have been established.

Introduce a classification of project partners going beyond their legal status and taking into consideration their main mission (for example: NUTS I/II bodies, NUTS III bodies, municipalities, research centres, associations, NGO’s, private commercial enterprise…), so to better understand and address the target groups of potential beneficiary when project generation or capitalisation is necessary.



EQ8: To what extent do the management processes,

from project application to payments, enable the

effective implementation of the projects? [Chapters 5]

The lapse of time between submission and approval is comparable to other ETC programmes (6 to 9 months). Some more months are requested to comply with conditions set by the MC, to sign the subsidy contract and actually start spending.


20% of project proposals did not pass the administrative eligibility check.

Inform the LP of the results of the eligibility check report and allow a limited time for project to provide missing or wrong documents, thus enlarging the basis for selection of the best projects.

No large start-up problems have been experienced but some delays related to setting up the first level control systems.

In the future programme, consider establishing special transitory rules that may prevent delays during the start-up phase, in the case in which delays in fine-tuning the National level regulations may have a larger effect on the whole programme area.

The strict interpretation of administrative rules severely limits or prevents on-going adjustments.

Examine in depth the cost/benefit ratio of allowing more flexibility to the administrative management of projects by one side, and the extra job requested to the implementation bodies.

Administration and reporting instructions are rated as clear but administrative burden is perceived by the project. The reporting template has been improved as it was considered time-consuming.


The time gap between actual expenditure, submission of progress report, revision and approval for reimbursement is often made longer by the fact the JTS has to ask for clarifications. The JTS faces the issue of common mistakes made in audit certificates as their routine tasks, in a pro-active attempt to reduce them, they also involve the FLCs in a specific networking effort and a yearly networking meeting inviting FLC’s is organised in Vienna.

It may be worth suggesting the MS to establish stricter criteria for the selection of FLC bodies, on the basis of proven experience or attendance to training seminars. A data base of FLC bodies performance might also be launched at National level to support the choice of Partners who can do so.



EQ9: How effective is the Programme monitoring

system? [Chapter 4.2.1]

The project beneficiaries complain about the fact the collection of data requested in the progress reports appear to be excessively time-consuming.

Analyse and match results of the system audit and the on-going evaluation for improvements to programme control systems.

Generally speaking, consolidate the on-going effort to reduce the administrative burden felt by projects in terms of controls, reporting requirements and strictness of rules.

The monitoring system provides useful information at a programme level. It doesn’t request the beneficiaries to feed the data directly into the system.

The establishment of a common web-based service allowing direct upload of administrative documents on a separate platform may reduce the rate of mistakes, giving the LP the possibility to be consulted remotely on specific administrative questions, before consolidation of the administrative reports.

The JTS has been experiencing some difficulties with the daily functioning of the monitoring system.

Main bottlenecks have been solved recently through a revision of the monitoring system. In the future it would be envisageable to have a more dynamic tool, not just limited to good management and documentation of documents and processes, but allowing the JTS to use it as an interactive working tool.

EQ10: To what extent do the projects deal with

problems already tackled by partner country's policies

(ROPs or sectorial policies)? [Chapter 3.4]

Projects application forms make reference to a VERY long list of country’s policies to which they refer to. By the practical point of view it is difficult to track partial achievements during the project life as those aspects are more widely considered in the final report. The progress reports are always enriched by “annexes” giving evidence of outputs achieved in the reporting period and the JTS is closely examining them, but it is still too early for drafting conclusions on this issue at programme.

Consider if it is worth modifying the progress report template in order to provide more useful information in terms of compliance to national/sectorial policies and leave more space for quality remarks concerning the achievement of the general objective. This would diminish the risk to be aware of some problems only in the final report.


7. Tables

Table 12 - National/sectorial policies quoted in the Application Forms of the sample projects

Priority 1 Hungary

• Economic Development Operational Programme of Hungary (1st priority axle: R&D and innovation;

• The Government's Mid-Term Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Strategy 2007-2013 in Hungary;

• Hungarian National Development Plan;

• Hungarian Regional Development Strategy;

Italy

• Industrial Plan 2015 in Italy;

• National Operative Programme Research and competitiveness of Italy C(2007) 6882;

Austria

• Economic Policy Guidelines and to the Innovation and Technology Transfer Strategy of the Province of Salzburg;

Germany

• High-Tech Strategy for Germany;

• High-tech Gründerfonds and EXIST – University-Based Business Start-Ups and “Entrepreneurial Regions - Innovation Initiative for the New German Länder”;

Slovak Republic

• Long-term State Science and Technology Policy until 2015 and the Lisbon Strategy for the Slovak Republic – Strategy of Slovakia - Competitiveness Development until 2010;

• Middle term strategy of Science, technology and Innovation Policy of the Slovak Government;

• Technological Fishing Pool;

Slovenia

• National Research and Development Programme 2006-2010, Slovenian Development Strategy 2006-2013;

• Programme of Measures to promote Slovenian entrepreneurship and competitiveness 2007-2013;

Priority 2 Germany

• The “Master Plan on Freight Transport and Logistics” in Germany;

• Berlin Declaration between the Federal Ministry and the German Eastern Bundesländer;

• National policies of the Ministry for Regional Development and Transport - Germany;

• Czech Republic

• Sustainable Strategy in the Czech Republic;

• Transport policy of Czech Republic for the years 2005 –2013 and its specific objective 4.2.2. Development and modernization of transport infrastructure;

• Concept of development of small and medium-sized enterprises for the period 2007 – 2013 – Ministry of industry and trade of Czech Republic;

Poland

• Polish OP Infrastructure and Environment for "Environment Friendly Transport".

• 10 of the priorities cited in the Polish National Transport Politics for years 2006- 2025;

Italy


• Italian General Mobility Plan - Guidelines 2007, Ministry of Transport; Slovenia

• Slovenian Operational Program for Strengthening Regional Development Potentials for the period 2007 – 2013;

Hungary

• 2nd National Development Plan and National Transport Policy of Hungary (2007-2013); Slovakia

• Competitiveness Strategy for Slovakia until 2010, Action Plan for the Strategy for the Information;

Priority 3 Poland

• Poland’s Ecological Policy 2007-13;

• The Polish National Waste Management;

Czech Republic

• Czech State Environmental Policy 2004-10;

• Act on Rivers and Lakes (Water Act 2001);

• Government decision no 897 (2003) on Targets and Structure of the Programme for Preventive Flood Protection;

• Act Regulating Spatial Planning and Building Development (Building Code 2006);

• Government decision no 561 (2006) on the “Spatial Development Policy”

Austria

• National Programme of the Austrian Federal Government;

• “Regional Partnership” of Austria;

• Forestry Act; Water Rights Act (1959, amended); - Austria;

Slovak Republic

• National Action Plan for the Slovak Republic to the Decade of Integration of the Roma Population 2005-2015;

• National Action Plan of the Social Inclusion;

EU

• BAP (2005) and the RES directive (2008);

Germany

• Steps towards improved Preventive Flood Protection. Five-Point Programme of the Federal Government (2002);

• Act to Improve Preventive Flood Control (Flood Control Act, 2005);

• Water Acts (national, federal states);

• Federal Spatial Planning Act (1997); Building Code (amended 2004);

• Relevant Acts of the Federal States,

Hungary

• Act on Water Management, Waterways and Lakes (1995);

• Act on the Improvement of Flood Protection with regards to the Regional and Landscape Development in the Theiss Valley (2004);

• Act on Spatial Planning and Land Use (1996)

Priority 4 Austria

• The National Strategic Reference Frameworks (NSRFs) for the period 2007 to 2013;

Slovak Republic


Poland

• Polish Ecological Policy (2007-2010), Government Programme of Post-industrial Areas;

• Bydgoszcz Development Strategy,

Italy


• Italian Regulation on Soil Pollution and Remediation of Industrial Sites;

Czech Republic

• The National Strategic Reference Frameworks (NSRFs) for the period 2007 to 2013 ;

Hungary


Germany

• German Federal Soil Protection Act;

• The Federal Building Code in Germany

Slovenia

• Development Strategy for Slovenia

Table 13 - Meetings of the Monitoring Committee

Meetings Monitoring Committee

2007 1 December 2007

2008 2 February 2008

July 2008

2009 3

July 2009

November 2009

December 2009

2010 3

June 2010

October 2010

December 2010

Total 9


Table 14 - Events organised by the CE programme / JTS

Year Number Event Participants 2007 1 Kick off meeting Vienna, July 2007 800

2008 6

3 Lead applicant briefing

2 Lead partner seminars

1 Partner search forum

350

62

410

2009 6

3 Lead applicant briefing

1 Financial training

1 Communication training

1 Annual Event

310

70

80

440

2010 10

1 Financial training

1 Communication Training

2 Lead Applicant Briefing

1 Applicant Briefing for strategic projects

1 Annual Event

4 Other events

220

50

186

223

200

495

Total 23 3,896

Table 15 - Events attended by the JTS

Year Number Event

2007 5 5 National events

2008 21

4 Kick off meetings

7 National events

10 general events

2009 30

18 kick off meetings

6 National events

6 General events

2010 16

4 Conference on Danube Strategy

1 Project Manager Network meeting

1 DB User Group meeting

10 General Events

Total 72


Table 16 - Consultations by NCPs and JTS

Year JTS NCP

2007 0 0

2008 174 219

2009 162 511

2010 98 244

Total 434 974

Table 17 - Joint NCP-JTS meetings

Joint NCP-JTS meetings

2007 0

2008 2

2009 3

2010 2

Total 7

Table 18 - NCP event participation

NCP event participation

Year Own events Other events

2007 0 0

2008 14 26

2009 19 27

2010 23 20

Total 56 73


Table 19 - Details on partners submitting proposals, per priority and CE region, during the first three calls

Regions Pr

1

Pr

2

Pr

3

Pr

4

SUB

MIT

ING

Pa

rtn

ers

Pr

1

Pr

2

Pr

3

Pr

4

Pa

rtn

ers

AP

PR

OV

ED

Ra

te o

f

succ

ess

UA3 L’vivs’ka 1 3 4 2 10 0 3 3 0 6 60%

PL63 Pomorskie 4 10 2 12 28 0 9 1 6 16 57%

CZ04 Severozápad 9 9 8 15 41 4 5 4 9 22 54%

PL52 Opolskie 0 1 1 2 4 0 1 0 1 2 50%

UA4 Zakarpatska 2 2 1 0 0 0 1 50%

PL22 Slaskie 25 10 24 10 69 9 5 13 4 31 45%

CZ06 Jihovýchod 26 9 18 11 64 10 6 4 6 26 41%

DED Sachsen 31 16 52 33 132 6 13 19 15 53 40%

CZ08 Moravskoslezsko 14 3 5 8 30 2 2 2 6 12 40%

AT21 Kärnten 2 5 8 3 18 0 3 3 1 7 39%

AT32 Salzburg 3 2 5 6 16 1 2 2 1 6 38%

CZ05 Severovýchod 7 9 8 3 27 1 3 5 1 10 37%

DEE Sachsen-Anhalt 15 13 18 19 65 2 4 10 8 24 37%

PL51 Dolnoslaskie 19 12 20 17 68 8 7 7 3 25 37%

SK03 Stredné Slovensko 13 8 12 12 45 4 4 4 4 16 36%

DEG Thüringen 14 6 14 14 48 1 6 4 6 17 35%

AT13 Wien 45 17 54 20 136 9 6 26 6 47 35%

ITD2 Trento 7 1 7 3 18 2 0 2 2 6 33%

UA1 Chernivetska 2 1 3 0 0 1 0 1 33%

DE4 Brandenburg 12 5 10 13 40 4 5 2 2 13 33%

HU33 Dél-Alföld 8 4 7 6 25 2 3 2 1 8 32%

HU23 Dél-Dunántúl 17 5 15 10 47 4 0 6 5 15 32%

PL32 Podkarpackie 6 2 0 14 22 3 2 0 2 7 32%

AT31 Oberösterreich 24 3 2 3 32 6 2 1 1 10 31%

SK01 Bratislavský kraj 55 3 36 17 111 11 2 11 10 34 31%

AT12 Niederösterreich 9 0 23 14 46 3 0 5 6 14 30%

CZ01 Praha 37 16 51 21 125 7 7 19 5 38 30%

AT22 Steiermark 39 16 39 26 120 8 7 10 11 36 30%

PL62 Warm.-Mazurskie 2 2 5 1 10 0 1 2 0 3 30%

ITD5 Emilia-Romagna 46 36 35 45 162 15 18 11 4 48 30%

PL41 Wielkopolskie 8 6 13 7 34 3 5 1 1 10 29%

DE3 Berlin 10 9 18 18 55 1 5 6 4 16 29%

DE8 Meckl.-Vorpommern 9 3 4 12 28 3 1 2 2 8 29%

HU22 Nyugat-Dunántúl 33 3 14 14 64 8 3 3 4 18 28%

PL12 Mazowieckie 26 11 38 7 82 6 4 11 2 23 28%

ITD1 Bolzano/Bozen 5 4 7 2 18 1 1 2 1 5 28%

CZ02 Strední Cechy 5 0 5 1 11 0 0 1 2 3 27%

PL61 Kujawsko-Pomorskie 4 2 14 10 30 1 0 3 4 8 27%

HU32 Észak-Alföld 23 2 13 15 53 8 1 3 2 14 26%

ITC1 Piemonte 46 10 19 19 94 5 2 8 9 24 26%

SK04 Východné Slovensko 25 15 8 13 61 4 11 0 0 15 25%

HU21 Közép-Dunántúl 23 2 10 11 46 6 0 3 2 11 24%

SI0 Slovenija 147 28 125 121 421 30 10 29 29 98 23%

PL42 Zachodniopomorskie 5 2 5 1 13 1 2 0 0 3 23%

DE1 Baden-Württemberg 54 3 43 22 122 10 2 13 3 28 23%

PL21 Malopolskie 19 5 16 13 53 3 1 5 3 12 23%

PL11 Lódzkie 16 4 6 1 27 3 0 2 1 6 22%

AT11 Burgenland (AT) 10 1 20 6 37 1 0 6 1 8 22%


Regions Pr

1

Pr

2

Pr

3

Pr

4

SUB

MIT

ING

Pa

rtn

ers

Pr

1

Pr

2

Pr

3

Pr

4

Pa

rtn

ers

AP

PR

OV

ED

Ra

te o

f

succ

ess

DE2 Bayern 31 10 26 24 91 6 2 7 4 19 21%

AT34 Vorarlberg 2 0 0 3 5 1 0 0 0 1 20%

PL33 Swietokrzyskie 1 1 0 3 5 1 0 0 0 1 20%

HU10 Közép-Magyarország 61 18 58 36 173 7 6 15 6 34 20%

HU31 Észak-Magyarország 9 8 9 6 32 0 2 3 1 6 19%

ITC3 Liguria 8 2 4 13 27 0 0 1 4 5 19%

CZ03 Jihozápad 11 3 14 16 44 2 1 5 0 8 18%

ITD4 Friuli-Venezia Giulia 23 15 38 10 86 3 8 4 0 15 17%

ITD3 Veneto 45 25 36 32 138 5 6 7 6 24 17%

CZ07 Strední Morava 14 2 9 8 33 3 1 1 0 5 15%

SK02 Západné Slovensko 17 1 15 14 47 3 0 1 3 7 15%

PL43 Lubuskie 1 1 0 5 7 0 1 0 0 1 14%

PL34 Podlaskie 1 0 5 1 7 0 0 1 0 1 14%

PL31 Lubelskie 3 0 4 0 7 0 0 1 0 1 14%

ITC4 Lombardia 54 9 31 26 120 8 2 5 1 16 13%

AT33 Tirol 2 1 2 4 9 0 0 1 0 1 11%

ITC2 Valle d'Aosta 1 0 3 1 5 0 0 0 0 0 0%

UA2 Ivano-Frankivska 2 1 3 0 0 0 0 0 0%

UA4 Volyns'ka 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 -

1246 433 1117 856 3652 256 203 329 221 1009

In blue: number of partners participating in the preferred priorities in each region. Source: CE information

management system

Table 20 - Legal status of partners submitting proposals in the first three calls (incl. partners out of CE area)

Pr 1 Pr 2 Pr 3 Pr 4 Partner

SUBMITTED Projects

Pr 1 Pr 2 Pr 3 Pr 4 Partner APPROVED

Projects

International organisation under international law

2 2 1 1 6 1 0 0 0 1

International organisation under national law 10 2 6 4 22 0 1 1 2 4

INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATIONS 12 4 7 5 28 1 1 1 2 5

Private commercial institution 15 0 0 0 15 1 0 0 0 1

Private institution 349 85 196 125 755 64 37 47 34 182

Private non-commercial institution 11 0 0 0 11 1 0 0 0 1

PRIVATE INSTITUTIONS 375 85 196 125 781 66 37 47 34 184

Public authority 193 158 380 433 1.164 35 73 121 97 326

Public equivalent body 689 194 552 401 1.836 155 96 170 90 511

PUBLIC BODIES 882 352 932 834 3.000 190 169 291 187 837

TOTAL 1.269 441 1.135 964 3.809 257 207 339 223 1.026

Percentage of Private partners 30% 19% 17% 13% 21% 26% 18% 14% 15% 18%


Table 21 - Calls for proposals

Call

Deadline

Applications

received Approved Success rate

Allocated ERDF

%

1

April 2008 96 29 30% 66 million 29%

2

March 2009 179 37 21% 72 million 31%

3

May 2010 136 28 21% 51 million

Totals 411 94 23% 189 million 81%

Table 22 - Proposals per priority/call

Call 1 Call 2 Call 3 TOTAL

Rec

eive

d

Ap

pro

ved

%

Rec

eive

d

Ap

pro

ved

%

Rec

eive

d

Ap

pro

ved

% R

ecei

ved

Ap

pro

ved

%

Priority 1 25 4 16% 65 12 18% 52 8 16% 141 24 17%

Priority 2 10 4 40% 17 8 47% 13 4 31% 40 16 40%

Priority 3 31 11 35% 58 12 21% 34 9 27% 122 32 26%

Priority 4 30 10 33% 39 5 13% 37 7 19% 106 22 21%

TOTALS 96 29 30% 179 37 21% 136 28 21% 411 94 23%

TA budget is 6%, or 19,7 million euro.


Table 23- Budget committed per priority (exc. TA) in 1st

, 2nd

and 3rd

calls, as from the revised OP (March 2011)

Budget Committed %

Priority 1 50,5 43,7 87%

Priority 2 49,5 37,2 75%

Priority 3 75,2 65,3 87%

Priority 4 56,1 42,4 76%

TOTALS 231 189 82%

Table 24 - Financial plan / as from the revised version of OP (March 2011)

Plan Committed %

2007 34,2 0 0

2008 32,9 67 204

2009 33,6 72 214

2010 34,7

2011 35,8

2012 36,9

2013 37,9

Total 246,0 139 138

Values include the technical assistance component (<6%).


Table 25 - ERDF received and paid

ERDF committed up to Dec-2010

(call 1+2)

ERDF claimed up to Apr-2011

(call 1+2)

% Paid ERDF to LPs %

Priority 1 29 156 835,44 2 623 140,23 9,0% 2 623 140,23 100%

Priority 2 28 879 225,68 3 043 726,53 10,5% 3 043 726,53 100%

Priority 3 48 798 205,06 5 143 613,43 10,5% 5 143 613,43 100%

Priority 4 31 995 471,55 6 707 554,93 21,0% 6 707 554,93 100%

Total 138 829 737,73 17 518 035,12 13% 17 518 035,12

Information received from Certifying Authority (May 2011)

Table 26 - Payments received from EU COM

2007 1 4,92 million euro 4,92 million euro

2008 1 7,38 million euro 7,38 million euro

2009 2 4,92 million euro

4,92 million euro 9,84 million euro

Total 4 22,140 million euro

Central Europe: Evaluation of programme activities - Second report 75

Table 27 - Output indicators of the sample projects as from reports already validated

I3SM

E

REU

RIS

CO

BR

A

MA

N

Ch

emlo

g

SoN

orA

LAB

EL

Tran

sWas

t

e Q-A

GEI

NG

Urb

Spac

e

Dan

ub

e

Lim

es

4B

IOM

ASS

CER

IM

CEN

TRO

PE

CA

PA

CIT

Y

KA

SSET

TS

TOTAL

Start date 09-08 12-08 10-08 11-08 11-08 09-08 01-09 12-08 11-08 01-09 10-08 12-08 09-08 10-08

End of project 03-11 08-11 11-11 10t-11 02-12 02-12 06-12 01-12 10-11 09-11 11-11 08-11 12-12 09-11

Latest report available 03-10 02-10 05-10 10-10 04-10 02-10 06-10 05-10 04-10 03-10 05-10 02-10 06-10 09-10

Calendar

advancement 60% 50% 50% 67% 45% 43% 43% 47% 50% 50% 50% 50% 38% 67%

Typ

e o

f

Act

ion

Ind

icat

or

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

%

A1

No. Of strategies/policy

documents developed/improved

1 0 1 0 1 0 7 1 1 0 1 0 6 0 1 0 4 0 8 0 1 0 1 0 2 0 35 1 3%

Joint transnational strategy and action plan

No. Of strategies/policy

documents implemented/adopted

6 3 1 0 3 3 1 0 3 0 2 0 8 0 1 0 2 0 27 6 22%

A2 No. Of new tools

developed

1 2 1 0 2 0 0 0 4 0 2 0 14 0 2 1 1 1 1 0 3 1 3 1 2 3 36 9 25%

No. Of new tools

implemented

1 1 2 0 3 0 2 0 6 0 2 1 1 1 1 0 3 0 3 1 2 3 26 7 27%

Transnational tool

development

No. Of trainings for new tools prepared or

implemented

4 3 2 0 7 0 3 0 7 0 6 0 8 0 7 0 44 3 7%


I3SM

E

REU

RIS

CO

BR

A

MA

N

Ch

emlo

g

SoN

orA

LAB

EL

Tran

sWas

t

e Q-A

GEI

NG

Urb

Spac

e

Dan

ub

e

Lim

es

4B

IOM

ASS

CER

IM

CEN

TRO

PE

CA

PA

CIT

Y

KA

SSET

TS

TOTAL

A3 No. Of permanent co-operations established

0 0 1 0 1 0 1 0 6 0 0 4 2 1 1 1 3 4 2 0 17 10 59%

Joint management establishment No. Of permanent

management structures established

0 0 1 0 6 0 2 0 1 0 8 0 18 0 0%

A4 Volume of investment

prepared 5 M

€ 0

70

?

0 4 0

0,1

M€

0

15

M€

0 N/A 0 0%

No. Of jobs to be

created through these investments

16

0

0

10

0

0

10

0

50

0 320 0 0%

Investment preparation

Volume of private/public funds

leveraged

5 M

€ 0

70

?

0 N/A 0 0%

A5

No. Of Pilot Actions implemented

(including number of investments realized)

0 0 6 0 3 0 19 1 14 0 5 0 1 0 50 0 4 0 102 1 1%

Pilot Actions

Volume of investment realised through Pilot

Actions

0 0

1 M

€ 0

0,4

M€

0

0,1

M€

0

0,3

M€

N/A N/A 0%

No. Of jobs created

through Pilot Actions

8 0 24 0 25 0 14 0 71 0 0%

A6 Other Feasability Studies 4 0 3 0 7 0 0%


PRIORITY 1 INNOVATION I3SME CERIM TOTAL

Start date 09-08 12-08

End of project 03-11 08-11

Latest report available 03-10 02-10

Calendar advancement 60% 50%

Type of Action Indicator

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e

app

rove

d A

F

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

far

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e

app

rove

d A

F A

ccu

mu

late

d s

o

far

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

%

A1 Joint transnational strategy and action

plan

No. Of strategies/policy documents developed/improved

1 0 1 0 2 0 0%

No. Of strategies/policy documents implemented/adopted

6 3 1 0 7 3 43%

A2 Transnational tool development

No. Of new tools developed 1 2 3 1 4 3 75%

No. Of new tools implemented 1 1 3 0 4 1 25%

No. Of trainings for new tools prepared or implemented

4 3 6 0 10 3 30%

A3 Joint management establishment

No. Of permanent co-operations established

1 1 1 1 100%

No. Of permanent management structures established

1 0 1 0 0%

A4 Investment preparation

Volume of investment prepared 5 M€ 0 5 M 0 0%

No. Of jobs to be created through these investments

160 0 160 0 0%

Volume of private/public funds leveraged

5 M€ 0 5 M 0 0%

A5 Pilot Actions No. Of Pilot Actions implemented (including number of investments realized)

1 0 1 0 0%

Volume of investment realised through Pilot Actions

0%

No. Of jobs created through Pilot Actions

0%

A6 Other Feasability Studies 0%


PRIORITY 2 ACCESSIBILITY

Ch

emlo

g

SoN

orA

KA

SSET

TS TOTAL

Start date 11-08 11-08 10-08

End of project 10-11 02-12 09-11

Latest report available 10-10 04-10 09-10

Calendar advancement 67% 45% 67%

Typ

e o

f

Act

ion

Ind

icat

or

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

%

A1 No. Of strategies/policy documents developed/improved

1 0 7 1 2 0 10 1 10%

Joint transnational strategy and action

plan No. Of strategies/policy documents implemented/adopted

1 0 3 3 2 0 6 3 50%

A2 No. Of new tools developed 4 0 2 3 6 3 50%

No. Of new tools implemented

3 0 2 3 5 3 60%

Transnational tool

development No. Of trainings for new

tools prepared or implemented

7 0 7 0 0%


1 0 2 0 3 0 0%

Joint manageme

nt establishm

ent


1 0 8 0 9 0 0%

A4 Volume of investment prepared

70 ? 0 4 0 N/A N/A 0%


100 0 100 0 0%

Investment preparatio

n


70 ? 0 N/A N/A 0%

A5 Pilot Actions

No. Of Pilot Actions implemented (including number of investments realized)

4 0 4 0 0%


0%


14 0 14 0 0%

A6 Other Feasibility Studies 4 0 3 0 7 0 0%


PRIORITY 3 ENVIRONMENT

REURIS LABEL TransWaste 4BIOMASS TOTAL

Start date 12c-08 09-08 01-09 10-08

End of project 08-11 02-12 06-12 11-11

Latest report available 02-10 02-10 06-10 05-10

Calendar advancement 50% 43% 43% 50%

Type of Action

Indicator

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e ap

pro

ved

AF

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

far

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e ap

pro

ved

AF

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

far

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e

app

rove

d A

F

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

far

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e

app

rove

d A

F

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

far

Planned Accumulated %

A1 No. Of strategies/policy documents developed/improved

1 0 1 0 1 0 8 0 11 0 0%

Joint transnational strategy and action plan No. Of strategies/policy

documents implemented/adopted

1 0 8 0 9 0 0%

A2 No. Of new tools developed

1 0 2 0 1 0 4 0 0%


2 0 1 0 3 0 0%

Transnational tool

development


7 0 7 0 0%


1 0 1 0 2 1 4 1 25%

Joint management establishment


2 0 2 0 0%

A4 Volume of investment prepared

0 0 0,1 M€

0 15 M€

0 15,1 M 0 0%


10 0 50 0 60 0 0%

Investment preparation


A5 No. Of Pilot Actions implemented (including number of investments realized)

6 0 19 1 0 0 0 0 25 1 4%


1 M€ 0 1 M 0 0%

Pilot Actions


A6 Other Feasibility Studies


PRIORITY 4 COMPETIVENESS

COBRA MAN

Q-AGEING UrbSpace Danube Limes

CENTROPE CAPACITY

TOTAL

Start date 10-08 12-08 11-08 01-09 09-08

End of project 11-11 01-12 10-11 09-11 12-12

Latest report available 05-10 05-10 04-10 03-10 06-10

Calendar advancem. 50% 47% 50% 50% 38%

Type of Action

Indicator

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e

app

rove

d A

F

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

fa

r

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e

app

rove

d A

F

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

fa

r

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e ap

pro

ved

AF

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

fa

r

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e

app

rove

d A

F

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

fa

r

Pla

nn

ed in

th

e ap

pro

ved

AF

Acc

um

ula

ted

so

fa

r

Pla

nn

ed

Acc

um

ula

ted

%

A1 Joint transnational strategy and action plan

No. Of strategies/policy documents developed/improved

6 1 0 4 0 1 0 12 0 0%

No. Of strategies/policy documents implemented/adopted

3 0 2 0 5 0 0%

A2 Transnational tool

development

No. Of new tools developed

2 0 14 0 2 1 1 1 3 1 22 3 14%


2 0 6 0 2 1 1 1 3 1 14 3 21%


2 0 3 0 7 0 8 0 20 0 0%

A3 Joint management establishment

No. Of permanent co-operations established

6 0 0 4 3 4 9 8 89%


6 0 6 0 0%

A4 Investment preparation

Volume of investment prepared



A5 Pilot Actions No. Of Pilot Actions implemented (including number of investments realized)

3 0 14 0 5 0 50 0 72 0 0%


0,4 M€

0 0,1 M€

0 0,3 M€

0 0,8 M

0 0%


8 0 24 0 25 0 57 0 0%

A6 Other Feasibility Studies


Table 28 - State of allocations of sample projects as from reports already validated

Title LP Institution Area of Intervention Total Budget Total SPENT %

REURIS REvitalization of Urban RIver Spaces

Central Mining Institute Poland Public Equivalent Body

3.1 Developing a High Quality Environment by Managing and Protecting Natural Resources and Heritage

3.409.303,00 € 773.623,87 € 22,69

COBRAMAN Manager Coordinating Brownfield Redevelopment Activities

City of Bydgoszcz Poland Public Authority

4.1 Developing Polycentric Settlement Structures and Territorial Cooperation

3.624.696,00 € 952.022,08 € 26,26

I3SME INTRODUCING INNOVATION INSIDE SMEs

Province of Bologna Italy Public authority

1.2 Establishing Capabilities for the Diffusion and Application of Innovation

2.752.512,89 € 958.164,42 € 34,81

CHEMLOG Chemical Logistics Cooperation in Central and Eastern Europe

Ministry for Economy and Labour of Saxony-Anhalt Germany Public authority

2.1 Improving Central Europe’s Interconnectivity

2.120.500,00 € 1.211.687,87 € 57,14

SONORA SOuth-NORth Axis

Veneto Region Italy Public authority

2.1 Improving Central Europe’s Interconnectivity

7.098.964,99 € 1.648.781,48 € 23,23

LABEL Adaptation to flood risk in the LABE-Elbe river basin

Saxon State Ministry of the Interior Germany Public authority

3.2 Reducing Risks and Impacts of Natural and Man-made Hazards

4.275.680,00 € 806.415,94 € 18,86



TRANSWASTE Formalisation of informal sector activities in collection and transboundary shipment of wastes in and to CEE

University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna; Institute of Waste Management Austria Public equivalent body

3.4 Supporting Environmentally Friendly Technologies and Activities

3.304.527,50 € 985.978,77 € 29,84

Q-AGEING Quality Ageing in an Urban Environment

Local Government & Municipality of District 11 of Budapest, ÚJBUDA Hungary Public authority

4.2 Addressing the Territorial Effects of Demographic and Social Change on Urban and Regional Development

2.612.750,00 € 627.038,98 € 24,00

URBSPACE Urban spaces – enhancing the attractiveness and quality of the urban environment

Regional Environmental Centre, Country office Slovakia (REC Slovakia) Slovakia International organisation under national law


2.407.790,00 € 863.596,74 € 35,87

DANUBE LIMES - UNESCO WORLD HERITAGE Nomination of the Central European part of the Roman Danube Limes within the international UNESCO World Heritage Framework “Frontiers of the Roman Empire”

KÖH - National Office of Cultural Heritage Hungary Public authority

4.3 Capitalising on Cultural Resources for More Attractive Cities and Regions

2.051.600,00 € 407.321,34 € 19,85

4BIOMASS Fostering the sustainable usage of renewable energy sources in Central Europe - putting biomass into action

Agency for Renewable Resources Germany Public equivalent body

3.3 Supporting the Use of Renewable Energy Sources and Increasing Energy Efficiency

2.409.563,71 € 559.099,53 € 23,20



CERIM Central Europe Research to Innovation Models

PVA-MV Germany Public equivalent body

1.1 Enhancing Framework Conditions for Innovation

3.610.236,45 € 1.027.185,34 € 28,45

CENTROPE CAPACITY Sustainable urban and regional cooperation for a polycentric territorial development in a competitive CENTROPE region

City of Vienna, Municipal Department 53 (Press and Information Services) Austria Public authority


4.515.462,00 € 860.931,56 € 19,07

KASSETTS Knowledge-enabled Access of Central Europe SMEs to Efficient Transnational Transport Solutions

Institute for Transport and Logistics Foundation (ITL) Italy Public equivalent body

2.4 Promoting Information and Communication Technologies and Alternative Solutions for Enhancing Access

2.488.069,00 € 928.317,73 € 37,31


8. Sources

8.1. Projects related sources

• REURIS (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• COBRA MAN (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• I3SME (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• ChemLog (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3, Progress Report no.4)

• SoNorA (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• LABEL (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• TransWaste (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• Q-AGEING (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• UrbSpace (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• Danube Limes - UNESCO World Heritage (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• 4BIOMASS (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• CERIM (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• Centrope_capacity (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3)

• KASSETTS (Application Form, Progress Report no.1, Progress Report no.2, Progress Report no.3, Progress Report no.4)

8.2. Programme related sources

• Annual Reports 2007, 2008, 2009 and 2010 of the CE programme sent to the EC

• Minutes of the MC meetings (CENTRAL EUROPE Programme, 3rd Monitoring Committee meeting, 22-23 July 2008, 5th MC Meeting 12-13 November 2009 Budapest, 9th

Monitoring Committee meeting 2-3 December 2010 Vienna – Austria)

• CE Operational Programme rev2.0 (March 2011)

• CE Implementation Manual

• Application Manual (1st, 2nd and 3rd Call)

• Reports of interviews to the CE Programme Management

• Reports of the interviews to NCP and project stakeholders

• European Commission (1999): The New Programming period 2000-2006. Methodological Working Papers. Working Paper 3, Indicators for Monitoring and Evaluation: An Indicative Methodology.

• European Commission (2006): The New Programming Period 2007-2013. Indicative Guidelines on Evaluation Methods. Monitoring and Evaluation Indicators. Working Document No. 2. August.

• European Commission (2000): The New Programming period 2000-2006. Methodological Working Papers. Working Paper 7, Ex Ante Evaluation and Indicators for INTERREG (Strand A and B). October.


• European Commission (2009): The Programming Period 2007-2013 Indicative Guidelines on Evaluation Methods: Reporting on Core Indicators for the ERDF and the Cohesion Fund. Working Document No. 7. July.

• European Commission (2010): Investing in Europe’s future. 5th Report on Economic, social and territorial cohesion. November

• Evalsed: The Resource for the evaluation of socio-economic development “The Guide”. http://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/sources/docgener/evaluation/evalsed/guide/index_en.htm

• ÖAR (2007) Report on the ex-ante Evaluation Operational Programme Transnational Cooperation “CENTRAL EUROPE“ 2007 – 2013. Draft 29th May 2007

9. Annexes

9.1. Questionnaires for interviews to MA, AA, CA, JTS, MC, NCP and LP

european territorial cooperation central europe...

Documents