Managing authority

For shared-management money (ERDF, ESF+, the Just Transition Fund, the Cohesion Fund) the managing authority is the body that actually runs things in its territory. It writes the calls, sets the selection criteria, evaluates the applications, signs the contracts and pays. The rules come from EU regulations, but the procedure, the language, the forms and the deadlines are national.

It works from a PROGRAMME agreed with the Commission for the whole 2021–2027 period, which fixes in advance how much goes to which objective in which region. That document is public and it is the best planning tool available: it tells you what a region is obliged to spend money on before a single call is published.

Calls are published on the authority's own site, usually only in the national language, and frequently with short notice. There is no central European index of them (the Commission does not aggregate shared-management calls) which is why the money that makes up most of the EU budget is also the hardest to find.

STATE AID rules apply here in a way they mostly do not under Horizon. Aid to an undertaking must fit an exemption, most commonly the General Block Exemption Regulation, or fall under DE MINIMIS, currently up to €300,000 to a single undertaking over three years. That ceiling is cumulative across all public support from all sources, so a company that has taken national innovation vouchers may have less headroom than it thinks.

This is usually where a first-time applicant should start. The competition is regional rather than European, the paperwork is in your own language, and the officials are reachable by telephone, none of which is true of a Horizon call.