Context
The COVID-19 crisis had a strong economic and social impact on Spain, and the European Union as a whole. In response to this situation, the EU activated the NextGenerationEU fund and the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), opening up an unprecedented opportunity to drive the green, digital, and social transition. However, these funds proved to be extremely complex at a regulatory, technical, and administrative level, placing many local governments, especially smaller ones, at risk of being excluded.
It was in this context that the Barcelona Provincial Council saw an urgent need to offer clear, accessible support adapted to the real needs of the territory. As a result, the Next Diba service was born, conceived as a user-centric response to ensure that all municipalities, regardless of their size, could access and manage European funds efficiently.
The project falls squarely within the category of Delivering User-Centric Services at Subnational Level as it puts local governments at the centre, simplifies complex processes, shares resources, and strengthens multi-level cooperation, with the goal of ensuring quality public services and a tangible impact on citizens.
Objectives
The mission of the Next Diba service is to ensure that no local government is left behind in accessing and managing European funds. It seeks to achieve this through three main objectives:
Firstly, Next Diba works to strengthen the positioning and influence of the local world on the design of European funding, in addition to defending its interests in multi-level governance spaces.
Secondly, it aims to provide high-quality legal, technical, and strategic support for attracting, executing, and justifying European funds, ensuring viable projects and efficient and transparent management. This advice is offered to both local governments and provincial council departments.
Finally, it seeks to generate a transferable management model, aimed at strengthening institutional capacities and sharing knowledge and best practices related to European funding.
To achieve these objectives, Next Diba offers solutions such as personalised advice, development of standard documentation and management processes transferable to other local governments, monitoring tools, information through a specific website, training, and institutional coordination spaces, thus helping to strengthen local capabilities and maximise the real impact of European funds in the territory.
Implementation
From the beginning, the Office of the Chair of Barcelona Provincial Council has overseen Next Diba, which ensures political leadership, cross-cutting coordination, and the ability for impact at an institutional level.
This was to meet an urgent need in response to COVID-19, but since then it has been adapted as necessary with a comprehensive, transferable, and flexible approach. As such, the team has increased from two to eight people, whose profile is markedly multidisciplinary.
Through the service, more than EUR 71 million has been mobilised for 179 local projects as well as the promotion of 18 of the provincial council’s own projects. To ensure sound execution, management instructions have been developed setting out processes, responsibilities, and documentation models that apply to the entire organisation. Collaboration agreements have been signed with other government authorities and key stakeholders to strengthen multi-level governance.
As a result of this initiative’s success, service’s scope has been expanded beyond NextGenerationEU to include other European funds. A new one-stop shop service has been created, in which several provincial council departments have collaborated, which allows identification of funding opportunities for strategic local projects and guide these projects in attaining and managing funding.