Cooperation with outermost regions
On 3 May 2022, the European Commission presented a European strategy for the outermost regions setting priorities for EU action with and for the outermost regions to foster their development, recovery and growth.
Interreg Europe supports cooperation among all European regions, including the most remote, both on the continent and at the sea. Our cooperation projects already contribute to this new European strategy.
There are nine so-called outermost regions in Europe:
- France (Martinique, Mayotte, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Réunion and Saint Martin),
- Portugal (Madeira and the Azores) and
- Spain (the Canary Islands)
These remote regions get a special attention and encouragement to join our cooperation projects and benefit from other cooperation opportunities offered by Interreg Europe. Our cooperation programme pays a special attention to all remote areas.
During the 2014-2020 period, six of the nine outermost regions worked in 13 projects on improving their regional development policies on a wide range of topics. You can scroll through the 13 projects below.
The outermost regions received 3.87 MEUR for the project cooperation which turned into a number of achievements:
- 73 good practices shared with others (28 in our database)
- Seven improvements in regional policies
- 11.8 MEUR mobilised to implement lessons learnt from other regions
For example, on the Azores, Portugal, they opened a call for acquisition of electric buses by their local public transport operators. The call was prepared following the lessons learnt from the EMOBICITY project. On Réunion, France, the cooperation with other outermost regions in GROW-RUP project opened the way towards improving the blue economy governance structure via Blue Institute. You can read about the other improvements and find out more at our project results page.
Our programme's work with and for the outermost regions contributes to the priorities for these regions presented in the latest EC communication "Putting people first, ...".
