Good practice:

Lower Saxon EU Funding Strategy

The mandate of the Land Government for the Lower Saxon European Ministry in 2018 was:
o to develop an optimal and broadly accepted funding landscape,
o to apply funding as efficiently and well-coordinated as possible,
o to implement a funding environment that fosters the efficient exhaustion of all funding ressources and
o to simplify funding as much as possible.

The ministry used a bottom-up approach for the development of the EU-funding strategy: Online consultation of over 500 representatives of the civil society, economy and scientific community. The strategy was developed within thematic workshops with the respective representatives of the ministries and lobbying groups. Information events were organised in order to inform all Stakeholders about the state of the project and to transparently display their influence on the process.

- Staff for the coordination of the design of the strategy
- Service provider for the development of an experts report
- Service provider for hosting workshops

As a result of the strategy development process, Lower Saxony was able to establish two ITI Instruments in the European Funding System („Zukunftsregionen“ and „Resiliente Innenstädte“). Furthermore, „Zukunftsregionen“ is an instrument combining EFRD and ESF and is helping to apply funding as efficiently and well-coordinated as possible.
Despite rising demands and more money in the Funding System for Lower Saxony, funding instruments could be aggregated.

• Broad stakeholder engagement for the development of the strategy in order to adapt funding instruments to the needs of the stakeholders
• Making use of synergies between the different European funds and hence making them more efficient.