Technical support provided to EU Member States

Briefing 31-05-2022

The Committee on Budgetary Control (CONT) organised a public hearing with the aim to get a better understanding about technical support and related challenges, especially concerning the areas of better administration, digitalisation and EU funds implementation. This briefing provided background information to this debate that took place 21 April 2022. It examines technical support as well as relevant technical assistance activities and provides a short insight into links between such support and administrative capacity building. The theme of this hearing is technical support; the instruments set up for this purpose are relatively new and, as it will be explained later, the availability of coherent and all encompassing lessons drawn from their experience is still limited. There are however possible overlaps, or rather synergies and complementarities with technical assistance activities in different policy areas. The author chose cohesion policy where technical assistance activities have been pursued for decades, and co-financing of projects aiminig at administrative capacity building has been prominent for several programming periods. Lessons learnt in the cohesion area can also feed the debate, as it is also obvious from the strong interservice cooperation among the different Commission services involved in technical support or assistance and administrative capacity building.