Today,1 February 2018, b-solutions initiative has launched a call among cross-border partnerships and structures from internal EU land borders for proposals on pilot actions that aim at showing how legal and administrative border challenges can be overcome. The call is open by 20 April. For application form and additional information, please visit https://www.b-solutionsproject.com.

The pilot actions must focus on employment, health, transport, multi-lingualism and institutional cooperation topics, and be implemented during a maximum period of 15 months starting from June 2018. Sub-grant can reach up to 20 000 EUR, and will be paid in two instalments. An interim and a final reports are expected from every pilot action. A panel of experts will select at least 20 cases.

b-solutions is an initiative to tackle legal and administrative border obstacles/difficulties along EU internal borders promoted by the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Regional and Urban Policy (DG REGIO), as one of the actions proposed in the referred Communication Boosting growth and cohesion in EU border regions, adopted by the Commission on 20 September 2017. This initiative will last for two years with the main objective of identifying and promoting sustainable methods of resolving border obstacles of a legal and/or administrative nature along EU internal land borders.

After the reporting phase of the pilot actions, a consolidated report (compendium) will illustrate main findings and proposals, and will also report on all cases identified. Lessons learned and policy recommendations are expected to be major outputs. Not selected proposals will also be analysed in order to draw some conclusions about main obstacles identified bottom-up (in comparison with those identified top-down, for instance).