Thanks to NECSTouR regions’ input and information sharing, we acknowledge that regional and local authorities have barely or not been consulted for the drafting of the national recovery plans. To address this situation, last 29 January the NECSTouR Presidency has addressed a letter to the Commissioner for Regional Policy, Ms. Elisa Ferreira, and to the Commissioner for Internal Market, Mr. Thierry Breton.

In the letter, we stated our willingness to collaborate with Member States in favour of co-creation and coordination of recovery projects, as a participatory approach is an explicit request to the Member States by the Recovery and Resilience Facility agreement. We suggested to establish mechanisms to enable regional and local authorities to work directly with the RECOVER Task Force of the European Commission, responsible for analysing the National recovery plans.

Influencing the presence of tourism investments in the Next Generation EU package remains at the core of our efforts after we called last week for the NECSTouR regions to keep working on defending tourism investments in the scope of the National recovery plans. We informed you on the latest insights and guidelines we gathered through our exchanges with European Commission representatives, specifically, with the Recovery Task Force.

Join our upcoming webinar

In line with the challenges that these issues make us face, from NECSTouR, we are organizing a series of workshop in order to help our members find solutions to canalise the EU funds into the tourism sector.

In order to know more about the National Recovery Plans of the EU Member States, to find out about possible eligible projects in line with the 7 flagship areas established by the European Commission, or to know more about how to direct the Cohesion Policy Funds’ investments towards the tourism sector, we warmly invite you to register to our upcoming workshop on “Tourism Recovery Projects: Recovery And Resilience Facility And Cohesion Policy Funds” next 12th of February, from 10:00to 12:00 through the following link.

Eu CoR warns: Regions and cities excluded from the preparation of post-COVID recovery plans

Lack of structured and systematic involvement of the regional and local authorities in the economic governance has been recently and repeatedly highlighted also by the European Committee of the Regions (CoR). Concerns were shared last October and on December the CoR launched a proposal on an economic governance review of the EU that aims to tackle this repeated issue through an opinion. The results of a joint consultation with the Council of European Municipalities and Regions this January highlights similar concerns specifically with regards to the preparation of post-COVID recovery plans.