The new ESPON 2020 territorial cooperation programme is here! It was presented during the first ESPON seminar held in Latvia past June. For those who did not attend the seminar, all presentations and sessions are available online. First of all, ESPON stands for “European Spatial Planning Observation Network” and it takes territorial cohesion and development across European countries as its fundamental pillars.
In a nutshell, the ESPON 2020 Programme aims at promoting and fostering a European territorial dimension in development and cooperation by providing evidence, knowledge transfer and policy learning to public authorities and other policy actors at all levels. In other words, the expected outcomes of ESPON 2020 programme will contribute to the “institutional capacity building and efficient public administrations”. That is, primary target users will be regional and local policy makers in territorial development and planning (e.g., urban planners, city councils, …)
Among the programme strategies and objectives, there is one (Specific Objective 3) that seems to be quite relevant: to monitoring European territorial trends, potentials and challenges and provide analytical tools for improved EU-wide territorial observation and analysis (a revised ESPON Toolbox). In implementation terms, almost all specific objectives, including the above one, fall under the Priority Axis 1: “Territorial Evidence, Transfer, Observation, Tools and Outreach” (47,5 MEuro out of 50,5 MEuro in total). First calls for Specific Objective 3 for example are expected by late October or early November 2015 to target most likely 8 tools.
In the last ESPON 2013 programme, the acceptance rate for scientific platform and tools was around 40% (17 projects out of 45 proposals submitted). Successful toolkits developed were ESPON data portal, European Territorial Monitoring System (ETMS), and CityBench (min 22:05). Let us hope the best for the new ESPON 2020