(20 May 2016) – Marjorie Jouen, adviser at the Jacques Delors Institute, traces the development of the EU cohesion policy and analyses the new challenges facing it, before proposing a number of recommendations for the future of the cohesion policy after 2020.
The author makes four key recommendations:
1) We should tailor investment priorities to the new chal¬lenges of societal and territorial cohesion, allowing greater room for the goals of integrating young people, of struggling against exclusion, of resilience, of improving standards of living, of participatory democracy, of social innovation and of creativity through the use of digital technology.
2) We should strengthen and consolidate the instruments for integrated territorial development implemented in 2014, community local-led development (CLLD) based on the LEADER model and integrated territorial invest¬ments (ITI), implemented chiefly in urban areas.
3) We should step up the promotion of territorial cooperation, on the one hand, as a specific goal devoted to European ter¬ritorial cooperation and, on the other, as a method for imple-menting certain measures in investment schemes between urban and rural areas, between coastal and mountainous districts, between local authorities and so forth.
4) A considerable portion (say, around 30%) of funds should be allocated on the basis of a criterion that is no longer the GDP-per-inhabitant ratio but the European Social Progress Index (EU-SPI).