Common Provisions Regulation (CPR) (EU) 2021/1060 has grouped eight shared management funds under a single rulebook to strengthen and streamline the legislative framework and enhance synergies between cohesion policy, maritime affairs and HOME affairs funds. Furthermore, the CPR amplifies the policy and implementation options to coordinate these funds better and enhance synergies among them and with other EU funds and instruments, such as the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the Technical Support Instrument (TSI), the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP, European Agriculture Fund for Rural Development), Horizon Europe (HE), the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), the Digital Europe Programme (DEP), the InvestEU Fund, LIFE, Erasmus+, the EU4Health Programme, and the European Globalisation Adjustment Fund (EGF).

DG REGIO has contracted t33, in consortium with OÏR, Spatial Foresight and Oxford Research, to assess the extent to which the Managing Authorities use the 2021-2027 policy and implementation options created to favour coordination and synergies among CPR funds and between cohesion policy funds and other EU funds and instruments, both at a strategic and intervention level.

The study coverage encompasses 395 regional and national programmes supported by CPR funds, all 27 Partnership Agreements (PAs), all 27 National Recovery and Resilience Plans (NRRPs) supported by the RRF, and the abovementioned EU funds and instruments.

The methodological approach includes two phases:

• The desk research aims to identify policy overlap, detect coordination mechanisms, and determine the type of synergies among CPR programmes, EU funds and instruments and the RRF.
• Interviews with 71 programme authorities, mainly Managing Authorities, provided information that not only complemented the documental analysis but also provided valuable insight into the data collected to facilitate the interpretation. Moreover, it helped identify good practices for mechanisms to support coordination among funds and policy options to implement synergies.