The European Cohesion Policy is practically implemented at national, regional and local level. The Member States (MS) analyse the situation in their country, identify their needs, areas in difficulty and disadvantaged social groups and set priorities for further development.

Taking into account the European priorities, they prepare a strategic document called National Strategic Reference Frameworks and decide how the EU funds will be spent.

Funds are then allocated to thematic Operational Programmes (OP). Each OP contains a set of priorities, eligible actions and beneficiaries.

The content of these documents is discussed and negotiated with the European Commission. When two parties reach an agreement, the European Commission adopts the programmes and provides an advance to the MS to allow them to set the programmes in motion.

Managing authorities (usually ministries or regional authorities) and implementing authorities (e.g. governmental agencies) then ensure smooth operation of individual OP.

The extent to which the MS include urban and sustainable energy issues into their OP and to which they delegate management of funds to the regional and local authorities varies from country to country.

In this section, you can find the overview of the Operational Programmes financing sustainable energy projects in the respective countries.

COMPARE YOUR COUNTRY WITH OTHERS!!!

TO GO BEYOND

EUROPEAN COHESION POLICY National Strategic Reference Frameworks For each European country, the booklet describes:  the investment allocated to the country for the 2007-2013 period in accordance with the 3 objectives  the targets of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) and the priorities chosen to achieve it  the translation of these priorities into Operational Programmes. Cohesion Policy 2007-2013: National Strategic Reference Frameworks Cohesion Policy 2007-2013: Factsheets The Inforegio website provides information about eligible european regions and financial allocations. For each country, it depicts the National Strategic Reference Framework and gives a summary of the current Operational Programmes. Cohesion Policy 2007-2013 SUSTAINABLE ISSUES IN OPERATIONAL PROGRAMMES EU Cash in Climate Clash The Central and Eastern European Bankwatch Network and Friends of the Earth Europe published the report «EU Cash in Climate Clash». They compared planned allocations for sustainable energy and public transport in the operational programmes of Central and Eastern European countries (CEE-10). The result? The analysis has revealed that energy effi ciency and renewable energy have each been allocated only 1% of all EU funds –-1.8 billion EUR in the CEE-10 countries taken as a whole! Read more about the results of this report (p. 9) and get know its author through the interview (p. 11) published in our publication TIME to use the Structural Funds for sustainable energy projects.