Context
National, regional and local public administrations in EU Member Staes face complex challenges. Cooperation at European level can help leverage available knowledge, facilitate mutual learning and peer support. The initiative Public Administration Cooperation Exchange (PACE) is an integral part of the Commission Communication on Enhancing the European Administrative Space (ComPAct). In 2023, 17 Member States participated in more than 20 exchanges, with over 100 participants, while more exchanges are underway in 2024. These exchanges will be based on identified needs and priorities for public administrations, including the digital and green transitions; improving public administration performance and implementation of EU laws and instruments.
Objectives
The objective of PACE is to help build administrative capacity by promoting cooperation and cross-border exchanges among Member States. This is done by providing opportunities for civil servants to experience the working methods of other EU public administrations. Such knowledge exchange and collaboration would help public administrations improve the design, implementation and evaluation of public policies and to provide higher quality public services.
Indicative Support measures
Exchanges will take the form of one or more targeted study visits, where 1-5 civil servant(s) from an EU Member State authority will be embedded in an EU peer administration from a few days to 3 months taking part in meetings, workshops, preparations of reports, analyses or strategies. For each exchange, a detailed programme will be defined between the host institution, guest civil servant(s) and DG REFORM. The project could entail a series of study visits as well as workshops to enlarge the number of possible stakeholders. In-person events could be combined with online meetings between visits.
The civil servant(s) participating in the exchange will agree on the preparation of a final deliverable, such as a report or study, to be described in the TSI request for support to be submitted.
Potential methods of collaboration through PACE could be:
- As a host institution, you prepare a project concept and invite other Member States to join in a co-creation effort to deliver a concrete outcome.
- As a sending institution, you define a project, initiative or reform you wish to get help to implement from peer institutions. you mobilise your network to identify possible host institutions in other countries.
- Joining up of several Member State institutions to prepare a multi-country project.
- Identifying an existing TSI project of interest to your institution, and request support to deepen your knowledge on the specific reforms carried out as part of that project through study visits. This can also be done as a multi-country project of several Member States interested in the same TSI project. Examples of TSI projects can be found here.
A shared space for Member States to collaborate prior to submission of their requests in October 2025 is also provided.
The implementation of the exchanges should ideally take place during the 12 months following the selection of projects by the TSI Board and adoption of the Financing Decision, i.e. indicatively between March 2025 and March 2026.
