European Strategy, local solutions: empowering municipalities to lead the EU’s Right to Stay Strategy

Reducing regional disparities is essential to put people in the position to exercise their right to stay in the place they call home. Such disparities are not only linked to access to quality services and opportunities: climate change and green transition related challenges also risk widening disparities if not properly addressed.

While cohesion policy remains the EU’s main investment tool to address these challenges and must stay central in the next EU budget, with stronger focus on impact and simplification for local authorities, we also recognise that additional efforts are needed: a Right to Stay Strategy would provide the opportunity to look at regional and local challenges with new lenses. It would facilitate the coordination of the efforts that the EU is currently putting in place in different areas.

We believe the Right to Stay Strategy to be fundamentally local: it depends on creating the conditions for people to live, work and thrive in their own communities. Growing territorial inequalities (depopulation, brain drain, unequal access to services, urban affordability), and the adverse effects of climate-related events are experienced locally and require place-based responses. 

As the European Commission is currently gathering inputs for the Right to Stay Strategy, we believe that the Strategy should:

• Be designed with local governments and their representatives
• Strengthen multilevel governance to move from consultation to co-creation of EU and national policies.
• Offer a long-term, common vision that supports local authorities in structuring and legitimising their local transformation agendas and mobilises them around shared objectives, contributing to a resilient, competitive, social and green Europe.
• Ensure that EU programmes and initiatives are better aligned with local governments’ needs, improving the availability, efficiency and targeting of EU financial support instruments. To achieve this, a territorial chapter under the next MFF would ensure that EU legislation would be well implemented.
• Fully recognise local energy efficiency, production, sharing efforts as the way to progress EU and national targets, while boosting local economy of lagging regions.

To respond to the specific challenges raised in the European Commission’s call for evidence, Energy Cities has put together concrete proposals to develop the EU Right to Stay Strategy.

Read the full Energy Cities’ answer to the call for evidence