On the 29th May the European Commission published the proposal for a Regulation for the future Interreg and Neighbourhood cooperation, supported by the ERDF funds (European Regional Development Funds) in the 2021-2027period. If adopted in this form by the Parliament and the Council, the proposal will lead to the disappearance of all maritime cross-border cooperation programmes, including the Interreg Italy-France (Maritime) program , and their replacement by transnational basin programmes (group 2 of Interreg projects, divided between transnational and strictly maritime cooperation programmes). Only land regions will therefore be able to continue to benefit from cross-border programmes: compared with the current scenario (see picture), the map of territorial cooperation is set to change radically.
The Commission’s approach is therefore to move beyond the current cross-border and regional dimension and to widen the scope to include non-European countries in territorial cooperation. While, on the one hand, it weakens the meritorious focus on the needs of island regions present in the current Interreg cooperation, this perspective rightly takes into account the forthcoming exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union and the necessarily macro-area dimension of maritime cooperation, which only with difficulty can be limited to a purely regional sphere. The position paper in favour of the creation of this macro-area, which was signed in mid-May by Stefano Corsini, President of the Northern Tyrrhenian Port Network Authority, has already been published.
The funding of the new European territorial cooperation programmes for the period 2021-2027 is expected to amount to a total of 2.6 billion euros, concentrated in investments on up to three thematic objectives.