Coordination and Support Action (CSA)

A coordination and support action does not carry out research. It coordinates, networks, studies, standardises, disseminates, builds communities, supports policy or prepares the ground for future work. If your proposal contains an experiment, it is not a CSA.

It is funded at 100% of eligible costs for every participant, with the same flat 25% for indirect costs. Budgets are smaller than for research actions (often €1–3 million) and durations shorter, commonly two to three years.

Eligibility is looser. Many CSA topics accept a single legal entity established in a Member State or Associated Country, with no three-country requirement at all, which makes them the most accessible collaborative instrument in the programme for an organisation that has never coordinated anything.

The page limit is 30 rather than 45, and that is a genuine constraint rather than a formality: the same three evaluation criteria must be satisfied in two thirds of the space. CSA proposals fail more often on vagueness than on ambition, because there is no experimental plan to anchor the writing.

The reason to care about CSAs is strategic rather than financial. They put an organisation inside the community that will write the next work programme's topics, they build the partner network that a later RIA or IA needs, and they establish a track record with the funding agency. A first CSA is often the cheapest route into a field that later pays much better.