Committee of the Regions adopts AgoraEU opinion with CEMR’s key policy recommendations at its core
The European Committee of the Regions (CoR) adopted its opinion on the proposed AgoraEU programme at its 171st plenary session. Drafted by rapporteur Csaba Borboly (RO/EPP), Vice-President of Harghita (Romania) County Council, the opinion sends a clear message to EU institutions: local and regional governments are essential implementing partners in Europe’s cultural, media and democratic future.
AgoraEU is the Commission’s proposal to merge Creative Europe and the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values (CERV) programme into a single framework for the EU budget 2028–2034, covering three strands: culture, media, and democracy. While the ambition to create coherence is welcome, CEMR and the CoR have both underlined that this merger must not dilute the specific objectives and funding of each stream.
Ahead of the CoR’s deliberations, CEMR submitted several policy recommendations to the European Committee of the Regions, which have been reflected across four critical areas.
Town twinning: from omission to recognition
The most important alignment concerns town twinning and networks of towns. CEMR called for twinning to be recognised as a strategic democratic instrument with a clearly earmarked budget line — a cost-effective vehicle for civic participation, intercultural dialogue and European identity-building, especially in the context of geopolitical instability and enlargement process.
The CoR echoes this directly, calling for twinning networks and cross-border municipal partnerships with dedicated multi-annual funding. It also formally regrets that the Commission’s proposal dropped the twinning actions provided for under CERV and calls for their reinstatement. Town twinning reaches hundreds of thousands of citizens each year, including in small towns and rural areas rarely served by complex EU funding instruments. A CEMR Analysis of Twinning in Europe in 2023 showed that local and regional government associations (LRGAs) play an important role in twinning. More than 80% of respondents stated that they have been active in this field in the last two years and 75% declared interest to continue and to develop activities even further including cultural exchange, peer learning and joint project implementation.
National Contact Points and simplified access
National local and regional government associations and city networks have a proven track record in channelling EU funding to grassroots actors. CEMR argued that well-resourced National Contact Points, hosted by national associations of local and regional governments, are essential to reach smaller municipalities, rural areas and first-time applicants, and that national associations and municipal networks should be formally recognised as strategic bridge actors empowered to manage Financial Support to Third Parties (FSTP) mechanisms.
The CoR moves in the same direction, though with its own framing. It stresses that proportionality must be assessed not only in policy scope but in accessibility and inclusivity, and endorses simplified grant formats, capacity-building support and two-step application and cascade grant processes that have proven their value in previous programmes. It also calls for AgoraEU contact points to be established at least at national level, and where appropriate at regional level. Critically, it proposes that own contribution requirements for small-scale and grassroots initiatives be capped at 10% of total eligible costs, coverable through national, regional or local co-financing — a practical measure that directly addresses one of the most persistent barriers to bottom-up participation.
Embedding local governments within the programme’s governance framework
The CoR holds that AgoraEU must fully align with active subsidiarity and multilevel governance, calling for the role of LRAs to be formally recognised in the regulation, for territorial participation indicators to be introduced, and for evaluation criteria to be explicitly linked to territorial cohesion and citizen engagement.
What comes next
The CoR opinion is a strong institutional signal. The challenge now is to carry this territorial voice into the EU budget negotiations between the European Parliament and the Council.
CEMR will continue to advocate for the four pillars essential to making AgoraEU work for local and regional governments: a protected budget line for twinning actions; well-resourced National Contact Points with a genuine territorial mandate; formal recognition of intermediary organisations to facilitate the access to small subgrants; and meaningful participation of LRGs representatives in programme governance from the outset.
Culture, media and democracy are lived every day in town squares, local theatres and municipal councils across Europe. AgoraEU has the potential to reinforce that. The CoR has made clear what it takes — now it is up to the European Parliament and the Council to move towards this direction.
Read the Committee of the Regions’ adopted opinion [here]
Discover CEMR’s EU budget campaign
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