State of the European Territory Report

The “State of the European Territory” (SoET) report should provide observations of the main territorial development trends in Europe and offer policy advice to support the framing of integrated territorial development strategies and related implementation tools at the national, regional and local scale for the post-2020 period. Policy recommendations presented by the report should take full account of the European Commission’s multiannual financial framework and the related legislative proposals for the post-2020 period. ESPON has a multitude of new territorial evidence from research activities covering not only diverse topics such as green infrastructures and ecosystem services, financial instruments, refugee flows, youth unemployment, cultural heritage, eHealth; these activities also look at various geographical areas from the entire EU territory plus Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, and Switzerland, to cross-border and larger functional regions. This evidence should be the key source for compiling the “State of the European Territory” report. Other relevant sources will be used to complement wherever information provided by ESPON might not be sufficient. The report will cover the entire ESPON space at different geographical levels (EU, national, macro-regional, regional, local). If relevant, it can also address other territories such as the EU candidate countries or even a broader scale (e.g. FDI flows towards Europe). The exact thematic scope of the report will be further specified in cooperation with stakeholders and agreed upon between the ESPON EGTC and the service provider at the stage of the inception report. Discussions with DG REGIO and other DGs of the European Commission will influence the scope, as one of the goals of the report is to contribute to the preparation of the 8th Cohesion Report, which is to be published in 2020. Therefore, the service provider should engage with ESPON’s main target group, i.e. policymakers. Several consultation rounds with the members of the ESPON Monitoring Committee (MC) are an integral element of the compilation process. The service provider will attend MC meetings/ESPON events to ensure that the report will be relevant for policymakers at the national level. By the same token, regional and local stakeholders are consulted and involved in the drafting process to ensure that the final publication will be of utmost use to them. A certain degree of consultation with the service providers who generated the original evidence that will feed the report is planned in to ensure that their results are correctly taken up. The final “State of the European Territory” report will offer practical advice to national, regional and local governance levels to help the responsible authorities and stakeholders to design and implement their integrated territorial development strategies efficiently, applying different types of tools, with a view to achieving EU level and global priorities (e.g. SDG). This service contract should provide inputs for the following key relevant policy processes: Cohesion Report to be published by DG REGIO in 2020; National policies on regional and spatial development; Integrated territorial development strategies of cities and regions; Renewal of the Territorial Agenda 2020; Implementation of the Urban Agenda for the EU. The “State of the European Territory” report will be published prior to a major ESPON conference in the second half of 2019. The report is a co-production between the selected service provider and the ESPON EGTC. The ESPON EGTC provides the overall coordination of the compilation process, offering ESPON data and content input for each chapter based on ongoing research activities.