From pilot testing to whole-city transformation for climate neutrality

Enabling City Transformation

The Enabling City Transformation Call invites Mission Cities to propose innovative actions to overcome systemic challenges faced when implementing climate action. This eighteen-month programme aims foster large-scale, city-wide transformation, building upon and progressing beyond the Pilot Cities programme.

With a budget of 22.8 million Euros under Horizon Europe, the programme aims to create practical, replicable solutions that support sustainable urban development, and climate neutrality across European cities.

The Call to participate in the Enabling City Transformation Programme is open from 5 June 12:00 CEST until 14 October, 17.00 CEST.

INFORMATION WEBINARS

Upcoming info sessions:

  • 17 September 2024, 10:30-12:00 CEST – Refresher on Ambition, Eligibility and Assessment Criteria. Register >>
  • 24 September 2024, 10:30-12:00 CEST – Impact Framework and Monitoring, Evaluation, Learning. Register >>

CALL DOCUMENTS

Call Guidelines

Application Templates

SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION

To submit your proposal, follow the instructions below to submit your application for the Call for Proposals ‘Enabling City Transformation’:

  • If not already registered with the system, use this link to register. 
  • If you have previously registered with the system (i.e. for applying to one of the Pilot Cities Programme calls): please use this link (and bookmark it!) to log-in. 
  • If you do not remember your password, please use these password reset instructions

Guidance on how to submit your application: 

TIMELINE

Enabling City Transformation Programme

The Enabling City Transformation Programme is an eighteen-month initiative focused on fostering innovation for comprehensive city transformation. Open to Mission Cities only, the programme aims to explore and implement enabling innovations that support large-scale, practical, and replicable learning. It is intended that the learnings made in this programme can support many other cities across Europe. By building the necessary conditions for city-wide transformation, the programme seeks to create a strategic portfolio of interventions that supports the implementation of the EU Cities Mission.

Selected cities will propose innovative actions to address systemic implementation challenges. This builds upon and progresses beyond the testing and experimentation approach developed in the Pilot Cities Programme, advancing towards large-scale implementation to achieve EU Cities Mission goals, paving the way for the sustainable, long-term transformation required for city climate neutrality.

Under the Horizon Europe framework, the total available budget for this call is 22.8 million Euros.

5 June 2024 - 14 October 2024

Open Call – Enabling City Transformation

6 December 2024

Decision communication

11 December 2024

Publication of Call outcomes and selection

December 2024 - March 2025

Contract development

FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

Eligibility

Yes – as long as that entity is not formally a/the Mission City administration, they can, as separate from the city, participate in another proposal. It is only the city administration proper that cannot be in more than one proposal.

No  – funding may not flow to non-Mission City administrations in this programme. Of course, they may participate in projects as collaborators/third parties in-kind, but they cannot be formally part of the grant.
There is a slight nuance with other levels of governance linked to a Mission City – for example, a Metropole (higher order) or district (lower order) that is formally linked to the Mission City – they can participate, and receive funding.

The compliance criterion is as it was with the PCP – so this is only that no one partner can have MORE than 2/3 of the total budget allocated to them; so, yes, smaller organisations can have smaller budgets, the limit is rather at the other level: no one partner should hold over two-thirds!
– “The requested subgrant allocation per legal entity not being more than two-thirds of the total subgrant requested.”

No, it is not an eligibility criteria. The only mandatory partner in the consortium is a Mission City as the lead applicant, and there should be at least 2 legal entities forming a consortium. 
Collaborations with research institutes and universities is always encouraged, provided it makes sense for the work you are planning to implement. Many universities are currently participating in the Pilot Cities Programme.

Term “from the city” relates to independence, not the localisation. Although partners should have a connection to the local work, as the projects are local based, this is not an eligibility criteria.

Independence from the city from a legal perspective (if a city can completely control an entity, for example a division of the municipality or a municipal company 100% controlled by the city, they are not independent).

There isn’t a maximum or recommended consortium organisations number other than 2 cities in the 1M€ envelope and 3 in the 1.5M€ envelope. In this portfolio there is space for much more collaboration among cities than in Pilot Cities Programme.

Yes, non-governmental organisations are eligible to be a partner in a consortium.

Yes!

Financial

It is important to remember that in case of equipment, only the depreciation of the equipment throughout the call is eligible. So if you plan to purchase a concrete piece of equipment for 10k EUR, only its depreciation for the 2 years of the programme (if you use it for 2 years) will be eligible. This very much depends on the accounting rules of your country. Additionally, usually equipment that serves the management of the project (for example computers for the employees) either should be already in place, or purchased from indirect costs. On the other hand, if a piece of equipment serves an implementation of the task (for example a projector to a physical space created within the project), it can be covered from the direct costs (depreciation).

Programme

It depends on the implementation challenge you are looking to overcome and the opportunity that you foresee in testing/intervening to learn: what makes most sense in terms of limited or wider scope intervention to serve the needs of both the challenge and opportunity?

We recommend to register on the Mission portal as a way to connect with cities or see if cities call out for specific expertise (https://netzerocities.app/social).

There is no clear yes/no answer, as it highly depends on a concrete example. You potentially can, but it has to be in scope of the call and ensure the learning factor required by the guidelines and the commission.

Review Mechanism and Assessment Criteria

“Benefit” is not something we can give you a definitive answer on: it really does depend. Is it beneficial to the interventions you wish to experiment with /the challenge you are looking to overcome, to do this directly with collaborating cities, or alone? Only you can answer that. That said, this call has placed an emphasis on city collaboration both within and between projects, and therefore thinking about this is important for your application (and relates to at least one of the specific criteria for assessment.)
 
From a practical perspective, you could apply alone but establish strong synergies with another/other project(s) (perhaps including other regional cities in the Mission) rather than apply together – but please note that there is limited funding and selection may not result in projects with which you create such synergies in application being selected – your application and interventions will still need to be coherent in their own right, and so we would discourage breaking a single project down into several applications where interdependency is integral to implementation and outcomes/success. That said, there will be time spent on identifying and planning for relevant selected project synergies in the portfolio in the Boot Camp phase for this programme.

Networking, reaching out to other cities, leveraging contacts discovered during the sensemaking sessions, and participating in the Enabling City Transformation Summer Sandbox Sessions are a few of many possible options.

If you have questions, you can reach out to us via email!