How can Managing Authorities better address the needs of mountain areas

The 2018 expert analysis on geographical specificities: Mountains, Islands and Sparsely Populated Areas has shown that there is a gap between programming and implementation – and that mountain specificities are too often lost in between.

At a time when Managing Authorities are starting their consultations to draft their future Operational Programmes, Euromontana invites them all to pay more attention to mountain areas and to rethink how they currently address the needs of these specific territories.

Euromontana’s factsheet is addressed to Managing Authorities and provides guidance on how to better take into account mountain areas in the 2021-2027 Cohesion Policy.

The factsheet includes:

• Recommendations to better take mountain areas into consideration all stages of the programming, from the ex-ante evaluation to the design of the Operational Programmes, the implementation, and the ex-post evaluation.
• Suggestions to develop specific tools and strategies for mountain areas (such as Operational Programmes targeting a specific massif), to encourage the use of all Priority Objectives, to support the uptake of some available tools (such as CLLDs and it is) and to encourage simplification for beneficiaries.