Cohesion policy survives in the Commission’s 2028-2034 budget proposal, but it survives inside something new. Twenty-seven National and Regional Partnership Plans would replace the fourteen separate programmes currently running, and the European Parliament has now opened its scrutiny of a design that regional governments say leaves them dependent on the goodwill of their own capitals.
The numbers are large enough to explain the anxiety. The fund carries €771.3 billion in 2025 prices, around 44% of the proposed multiannual financial framework. It absorbs the common agricultural policy, cohesion, social spending, fisheries, rural development and migration and border management into one national envelope per member state.
A single envelope means those policies now compete against each other. A national government that wants to fund border infrastructure and a regional government that wants to fund a transport link no longer draw on separate pots. They draw on the same one, and the government writing the plan decides. The Commission argues this delivers flexibility and better value for money.
Regions read the same architecture differently. The European Parliament research service briefing on the plans records the central objection plainly: including regional and territorial chapters is left entirely to the discretion of member states. A capital that wants regional input can invite it. A capital that does not can write the plan alone and still comply.
That discretion matters most in exactly the countries where cohesion policy matters most. Member states with weak regional administrations and centralised budget processes have historically relied on the ring-fenced structure of the European Regional Development Fund to protect spending in poorer areas. Remove the ring fence and nothing guarantees the money reaches the same places.
The Committee of the Regions has run stakeholder consultations on the fund regulation and its March 2026 plenary called for a stronger regional role. Bruegel has argued that national plans risk drowning out regional voices unless the regulation makes territorial chapters mandatory rather than optional. The Assembly of European Regions has been blunter still, describing the proposal as a threat to multi-level governance.
Supporters of the reform make a fair point in reply. The current system delivers slowly. Programme approval consumed years at the start of the 2021-2027 period, and absorption rates in several member states remain uncomfortable this late in the cycle. The mid-term review approved amendments to 186 national and regional programmes across 25 member states, shifting close to 10% of the €367 billion envelope toward defence, housing and energy connectivity. That level of redirection was possible only because the Commission opened the door to it.
Performance-based disbursement borrows from the recovery and resilience facility, where money follows milestones rather than receipts. That model moved funds faster. It also concentrated negotiating power in finance ministries and the Commission, cutting regional authorities out of conversations they used to join. Whether that trade is worth making depends on what anyone thinks cohesion policy is actually for.
The Commission will produce a strategic report in autumn 2026 setting priorities for the 2028 annual budget, and that report will shape how member states draft their plans and how the Commission assesses them. Parliament and Council will hold a structured dialogue on it. Regional governments have no formal seat at that table either.
Negotiators still have room to change the text. Making territorial chapters compulsory, setting a minimum share for less developed regions, or giving regional authorities a consultation right with legal force would each address the complaint without abandoning the single-plan design. None of those amendments has majority support yet, and cohesion policy for the next decade will be settled long before anyone measures whether disparities narrowed.
