Creative Europe

The Committee on Culture and Education adopted the own-initiative report by Silvia COSTA (S&D, IT) on the implementation of Regulation (EU) No 1295/2013 of the European Parliament and of the Council establishing the Creative Europe Programme (2014 to 2020) and repealing Decisions No 1718/2006/EC, No 1855/2006/EC and No 1041/2009/EC.

Members recalled that the Creative Europe programme has the objectives of safeguarding and promoting European cultural and linguistic diversity, and while promoting Europe's cultural heritage on the one hand and strengthening the competitiveness of the European cultural and creative sectors on the other.

Budget and expectations of the programme: Members urged the Member States to increase the Creative Europe budget to bring it into line with the expectations of European citizens. They regretted the lack of financial capacity continues to be one of the main obstacles for potential applicants and the under-representation of micro-cultural operators among funded organisations and certain sectors in the Culture sub-programme should be addressed.

As regards the next programming period, the Commission is called upon to:

• enhance the programme’s consistency with all relevant EU policies and other funding sources;
• ensure a good coordination between the DGs in charge of Creative Europe, as well as with the Education, Audiovisual and Culture Executive Agency (EACEA) and the Creative Europe Desk (CED);
• work as closely as possible with UNESCO, the Council of Europe and the OECD;
• retain the present structure of Creative Europe, while examining and better defining the specificities of the two different sub-programmes, to strengthen the potential of the cross-sectoral strand, and to verify whether the Guarantee Fund is effective in its implementation;
• set more than the existing six areas of expertise for evaluators, in order to cope more effectively with the specific areas;
• increase transparency of the contestation procedure for rejected applications;
• provide training and capacity-building opportunities for cultural operators who wish to improve their skills with respect to application procedures, overall project management and project implementation;
• better support cultural operators in finding partners for the cooperation projects, through measures including but not limited to dedicated matching sections within the most important European cultural events;
• further simplify the application and reporting procedures;
• use all available tools for even better promotion and dissemination of results of the implemented projects;
• further simplify the financial aspects, by extending the lump-sum instrument and encouraging greater use of flat-rate reimbursements.

MEDIA sub-programme: as regards this sub-heading, Members recommended a series of improvements which seek to: (i) increase the financing of subtitling and dubbing; (ii) extend the scope of training; (iii) support independent TV producers; (iv) support cinema networks, such as Europa Cinemas; (v) raise the funding ceiling for European video games, in order to include projects with transnational distribution potential (sports games, sandbox games, etc.).

Culture sub-programme: Members called on the Commission to balance the weight of the economic dimension with the intrinsic value of arts and culture per se, and to focus more on artists and creators. They recommended that European cooperation projects take into account innovation, mobility and extended co-productions. They also called on the Commission to introduce possible measures to limit the disproportion between the number of beneficiaries and the number of applicants including, among other things, an increase in the budget for the Culture Sub-programme, more adequate representation of all cultural and creative sectors, and more support for smaller-scale projects.

Members also called for: (i) the enhancement of translation for the promotion of the linguistic diversity heritage; (ii) the reintroduction of the European Theatre Prize; (iii) actions to give the European Heritage Label more visibility; (iv) support to the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018; (v) access of refugees versed in the arts to the Creative Europe programme to be facilitated.

Cross-sectoral strand: Members urged the Commission to develop and fully use the potential of the strand by introducing three new support measures: (a) Creative Europe Mundus for transnational cooperation, (b) social inclusion and (c) innovative crossover and cross-sectoral projects.

The Commission is asked to seek to achieve a geographic and sectoral balance in the Guarantee Facility, to ensure equal access for small-scale organisations and grassroots initiatives and projects from all Member States.

The Commission is also called upon to improve the implementation of the programme with the help of the Creative Europe Desks (CEDs).

Recommendations for future generations of the programme: lastly, Members recommended that Creative Europe be continued, reviewed and improved over the period 2021-2028, as a programme that includes all cultural and creative sectors, with emphasis on high-quality projects, with the same value and priorities, with two sub-programmes and a cross-sectoral strand including training, audience development, market access, social inclusion, cooperation, cross-sectoral and crossover projects and peer-to-peer learning, as well as communication, studies, support tailored to the cultural and creative sectors, a guarantee facility, and the support for CEDs.

They underlined the intercultural dimension of the programme in the future.

Furthermore, Members called for:

• the legal basis for the next programme to explicitly include the promotion of cultural and artistic quality and the intrinsic value of culture among the objectives of the programme and the sub-programmes, as well as among the selection and evaluation criteria;
• the Commission to take a proactive approach to the admission of new countries to the programme, with special status for European Neighbourhood South and East countries;
• the promotion of European film co-productions;
• the Commission to assess whether it would make sense to create a European observatory on culture and creativity comparable to the European Audiovisual Observatory.