Europe and local authorities 

70% of the decisions made by the European institutions have a direct impact on the municipalities, departments and regions of France, and 70-80% of public investments in Europe are made by local and regional authorities. As regards the subsidiarity principle, regional authorities appear to be the most appropriate level of governance to implement European public policies.  It is crucial for French regional civil servants to understand how the European institutions function.

European law is having an increasing impact on local public management, particularly on the regulations relating to public contracts, public service delegations and State aid. Local public decision-making is part of the European legal environment that determines it: thus local authorities are finding that room for manoeuvre in their areas of expertise is gradually being reduced. This attack on the free administration of regional authorities can be problematic when the latter are not included in the European decision-making process. 

Indeed, although the local authorities are represented within the Committee of the Regions, this is only a consultative body: EU lawmaking remains the prerogative of the States and the European institutions. 

The European Union budget for the period 2014-2020 amounted to 960 billion euros (1% of Europe’s GDP), which is approximately 35 billion euros less than the annual financial scope in 2007-2013. A sum of 325.1 billion euros was allocated to the economic, social and regional cohesion policy (approximately 35% of the EU budget). 

The economic, social and regional cohesion policy (or ‘regional policy’) is the tool the EU uses to operate in the regions: it aims to strengthen the unity of the European economies by reducing wealth gaps between the regions resulting from the successive expansions of the Union. The cohesion policy and the rural development pillar of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) rely on five funds: the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF), the European Social Fund (ESF), the Cohesion Fund (CF), the European Agricultural Fund for Rural Development (EAFRD) and the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund (EMFF). 

Approximately 27 billion euros were allocated to France for the 2014-2020 period.

European integration thus provides a wide range of resources for regional authorities to make an impact in public management and carry out their projects. During the 2007-2013 programming, France was criticised for its low level of use of these funds. 

The MAPTAM law of 27 January 2014 transferred the management of European funds to the newly reorganised French regions. It is now the responsibility of the regional councils to allocate European funds by selecting eligible local authority-managed projects in their regions. Additionally, these authorities can also use of the tools offered by the European Investment Bank to boost their regional development. 

The term External Regional Authority Initiatives (AECT) describes all types of co-operation (project or development) that French regional authorities can carry out in their areas of expertise in collaboration with foreign authorities: promoting the region, humanitarian aid, decentralised cooperation, involvement in events etc.   

When external action is formalised by an agreement between local authority partners (town twinning, friendship and/or cooperation pacts etc.) this is referred to as decentralised cooperation, a concept made possible in the Madrid Outline Convention of the Council of Europe on 21 May 1980.

The mission of the Delegation for the External Local Authority Initiatives (DAECT) is to define and enact the Support and Development strategy for decentralised cooperation, in consultation with the National Commission for Decentralised Cooperation (CNCD). It supports the authorities and their partners in their initiatives aiming at international solidarity, regional promotion and increasing attractiveness. 

The French atlas of decentralised collaboration identifies the French and foreign regional authorities that are active internationally, and provides contact details for the people responsible for international relations within the authorities. To find out how a foreign or French authority can request a collaboration, click here. 

 

European regional cooperation makes it possible for authorities in different countries to find common solutions in domains that go beyond their administrative borders, and thus contribute towards a shared development. The European regional cooperation project is a sub-programme of the ERDF with a budget of 8.9 million euros over the 2014-2020 period. 

The European regional cooperation programmes offer subsidies to co-finance regional authority projects. These subsidies come from the European Regional Development Fund and contribute to building a pan-European administrative space. To this end, the authorities can create cross-border cooperation bodies, with or without legal personality. In this context, the European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation (EGTC), created in 2006, contributes to removing the administrative and legal barriers faced by regions when implementing regional cooperation projects and thus to creating a “pan-European administrative space”.

In France, the Mission Opérationelle Transfrontalière (MOT, Cross-border Operational Mission) is an association that offers its members help and expertise for regional cooperation projects, while keeping an eye on the benefits and challenges for cross-border regions.  

France has nearly 3,000 kilometres of border areas and is involved in many cross-border collaborations on a number of different scales: local, regional (notably Euro-districts), supraregional (such as Greater Luxembourg, the Upper Rhine, the Pyrenees Euro-region), and interstate. Coordinated action between these levels is crucial. Thus the French Government created the Mission Opérationnelle Transfrontalière (MOT) in 1997, which brings together the various authorities on each side of the border and their cross-border groups.

A great diversity of sub-State authorities can be observed on the European continent, whether in terms of size, population, skills or financial resources. Studying the regional authorities in Europe therefore requires a comparative approach. In 2016  approximately 160,000 regional authorities could be found in the 47 Member States of the Council of Europe, of which 90,000 were in the 28 Member States of the European Union.

The European Union (EU) has a total of 92,247 municipalities and 225 ‘regional’ level authorities: meaning they cover a larger area in the territorial division. These 225 ‘regional’ authorities are present in 19 countries, of which 12 countries have two levels and 7 have three levels of authorities.

France has the largest number of authorities of all countries in the European Union. On 1 January 2019, there were 66.6 million inhabitants in France spread across 18 regions, 101 départements and 34,970 municipalities.