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Submission & evaluation process
The aim of this call is to select from Mission Cities a portfolio of interventions aimed at enabling city transformation within the context of the Cities Mission and its goals. Unlike the Pilot Cities Programme, which aimed at identifying and overcoming barriers to climate action in cities, the Enabling City Transformation (ECT) Programme is designed to explore and implement enabling innovations for whole-city transformation. These innovations should lead to practical, replicable learning at scale and support many other European cities. Cities and city groups should therefore focus their proposals on building enabling factors and conditions for transformation in ways that other cities can practically use, and that will be replicable across the Mission.
The aim of this call is to select from Mission Cities a portfolio of interventions aimed at enabling city transformation within the context of the Cities Mission and its goals.
How to submit a proposal?
The applications are submitted online via the grant management platform:
- If not already registered with the system, use this link to register.
- If you have previously registered with the system (i.e. for applying to one of the Pilot Cities Programme calls): please use this link (and bookmark it!) to log-in.
- If you do not remember your password, please use these password reset instructions
Guidance on how to submit your application:
How to register in the System?
Please note that any proposals submitted outside of the proposal submission system will not be accepted; and that the system will be locked after the deadline. If you experience technical difficulties, please consult the system guidance. If you are still unable to resolve your system issue, please contact NZCsupport@climate-kic.org. For all other non-technical related queries, please contact ect@netzerocities.eu.
Who can apply?
Only local authorities or city administrations selected to be part of EU Mission for climate-neutral and smart cities by 2030 (Mission Cities) are eligible to apply to and receive funding under this Call. For the avoidance of doubt, this call is addressed to designated Mission cities only and therefore these consortia may not include other city, district, or municipal authorities (i.e., ‘non-Mission’).
Please note: Administrations of a higher level of governance (i.e., a metropolis, region, or national/governmental departments) are eligible to participate as consortium partners where there is a formal governance link with the Mission City/cities leading or involved with the proposal. However, they do not count towards the eligible Mission City count (i.e., as related to the prescribed budget envelopes and the number present in the proposal) unless the metropolis or region is itself the Mission City, formally.
A group of Mission Cities (national or trans-national) may apply together in a consortium. However, in that case, one of the Mission Cities will have to be designated as the consortium leader for all administrative and process-related purposes. In the case of a group of cities applying together in one proposal, the size of the requested subgrant must follow the award amounts as stated at section 4.1 of the Call Guidelines.
Other organisations could also participate as members of a consortium led by a Mission City. These organisations could be, for example: research institutions, universities, SMEs, NGOs, associations, citizen groups or other relevant stakeholders involved in the implementation of the climate ambitions of a Mission City participating in the consortium.
For comprehensive information, including eligibility criteria, please consult the Call Guidelines.
Evaluation process
This Call will follow a three-stage evaluation and selection process:
Stage 1: Eligibility check
The eligibility check stage entails the assessment of pass/fail requirements (see 5.2 in the Call Guidelines) that are assessed by the SGA-NZC Consortium. Proposals must comply to the full set of eligibility criteria to proceed to Stage 2.
Proposals that fail the eligibility criteria will not be considered further in the process and applicants will be informed of the outcome.
Stage 2: Evaluation and scoring of eligible proposals
Proposals will be scored against the individual assessment criteria (see section 5.3 in the Call Guidelines) by at least two independent external experts, based on the submitted proposals. These experts are appointed from the pool of experts identified through an open call and contracted by the coordinator as part of the NetZeroCities project. The experts from this pool are deployed against all Calls for Pilot Cities and the call for Enabling City Transformation interventions. This evaluation is made using sub-criteria grouped into the three main categories of: Mandate to Act, Capacity to Act, and Impact.
The detailed criteria for assessment of proposals for the SGA-NZC Enabling City Transformation programme’s financial support to third parties scheme is defined in section 5.3 of the Call Guidelines.
Stage 3: Strategic Portfolio Selection
The selection committee will select a portfolio of interventions through a dedicated selection process. The portfolio will be selected with the intention to support Mission Cities to overcome challenges to, experimenting with, and learning about, the implementation phase of the Cities Mission: i.e. enabling (Cities) Mission innovation implementation. It will also aim at complementing the existing cohorts of Pilot Cities (i.e. inter-cohort portfolio) selected through previous calls, creating opportunities to exploit learning and outcomes of these diverse interventions over the course of the programme.
The selection of the interventions to be supported through the subgrants will build on the review by independent external experts and the scores noted in Stage 2.
All submissions will be assessed fairly and transparently in the scope of the eligibility criteria, assessment of quality criteria, and strategic programme considerations as outlined in section 5.4 of the Call Guidelines. Decisions as to whether a proposal is accepted or rejected will be communicated as detailed in this document.
Further information
Funding
The total available budget under this call is 22.8 million Euros (EUR). Funding rules defining the budget allocation to any one proposal and - subsequently selected intervention - follows a logic linked to the number of Mission Cities included in any one proposal:
500,000 - 600,000 EUR[1]
- 1,000,000 EUR: proposals with a minimum of two distinct Mission Cities (i.e. formally selected as such), plus any additional consortium partners.
- 1,500,000 EUR: proposals with a minimum of three distinct Mission Cities (i.e. formally selected as such), plus any additional consortium partners.
[1]As per the Grant Agreement text (HORIZON-RIA-SGA-NZC-101121530), the minimum grant to be allocated to a proposal through this Call is 500,000 EUR, with the maximum grant to be allocated to a proposal being 1,500,000 EUR. An upper range in this subgrant envelope is set to provide sufficient funding for at least one city and consortium partner, relative to the other subgrant envelopes. Therefore, for this envelope proposals may have a budget range and grant allocation request between 500,000 and 600,000 EUR.: proposals with a minimum of one Mission City plus at least one additional consortium partner (NB: the additional consortium partner may be another eligible Mission city/district).
Timeline:
- 5 June 2024, 12:00 CEST – call launch
- 14 October 2024, 17:00 CET – call deadline
- 6 December 2024 – decision communication
- December 2024/ February 2025 - Boot Camp
- December 2024/ March 2025 - Award Agreement development
- 17 March 2025 – programme starting date
- 16 September 2026 – programme ending date
Info Sessions:
- 12 June 2024, 14.00-15.30 CEST – Ambition, Approach & System and technical information (register)
- 19 June 2024, 11.30 – 13.00 CEST – Eligibility and Assessment Criteria (register)
- September (date to follow) – Impact Framework and Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL)
- September (date to follow) – Refresher: Ambition, Approach & System and technical information
- September (date to follow) – Refresher: Eligibility and Assessment Criteria, and Q&A
Relevant documentation:
- Call guidelines: Provide information on the aim, scope, and approach of the call and clarify how to submit a proposal, budget requirements, and the review mechanism and decision-making process.
- Call Financial Guidelines: Explain the application budget and contain the main legal and financial rules.
- Budget Template: An Excel-based budget template to support cities and their consortium partners to draft budgets, prior to putting them in the submission system.
- Call Form Template: A Word template containing the application narrative questions and check-boxes for other submission requirements. This is to support offline/collaborative drafting, before copying into the submission system ahead of the deadline.
- Work Plan Template: An Excel-based template for capturing the key work plan components, and that reflects the submission system’s work plan architecture (Work Packages, Deliverables, Activities). This is to support offline/collaborative drafting, before copying into the submission system ahead of the deadline
- Risk tables template: An Excel-based template for capturing risks (within one or more Risk Registers), and that reflects the submission system’s Risk table architecture. This is to support offline/collaborative drafting, before copying into the submission system ahead of the deadline
- Impact Framework and Indicators Template: A template that summarizes the 'impact' section of your application and will be attached to your application in the system. Please refer to the pre-selected indicators in the Indicator Set when choosing your indicators.
- Letter of Support: Mandatory. Letter of support from the city mayor (or equivalent) and/or any city official mandated to sign on the city/mayor/city council’s behalf, for the NZC Enabling City Transformation Programme. In the case of a multi-city proposal, one letter must be provided for each city.
All of the above files are available on this webpage: LINK
Form of grant:
Financial support is provided in the form of cascading grants based on, and reimbursed against, actual costs incurred and submitted in interim and final reporting.
Task description
The Enabling City Transformation programme aims to support interventions in cities with the goal of enabling the deployment and scaling of solutions. Drawing on insights from previous Mission activities, it seeks to leverage research and innovation outcomes. The programme combines multiple levers of change, including social, cultural, technological, nature-based, regulatory, and financial innovation, as well as new business and governance models, to drive the climate transition.
Through the combination of interventions supported in this programme, cities will collectively aim to achieve breakthroughs in enabling whole-city innovation and subsequent implementation at scale (direct Outcomes), that will ultimately lead to the reduction of GHG emissions and maximising Co-benefits, by unlocking the deployment of solutions at whole-city level (long-term targeted impacts).
The selection of proposals will result in multiple implementation-enabling innovations focussing on resolving key implementation barriers. Interventions will work individually and in combinations/clusters to generate resolutions for shared challenges.
Activities eligible for funding are:
Interventions should consist of the following activities to be eligible for funding:
- Pioneering activities to support climate-neutrality, including the deployment of innovative (new or improved) technology, product, process, service, solution, policy, or governance model at city level, explored in a cross-sectoral and systemic manner.
- Systemic, science-based innovative initiatives that strengthen cities’ use of scientific research and ensure translation of research results into policy actions, to accelerate climate neutrality in the sectors/domains of water, food, energy, industry, housing and deep building retrofitting, transport, and mobility through the levers of green technology (i.e., digitalisation), behavioural/lifestyle change, social innovation, culture, policy and regulation, finance, and new business models (e.g., circular economy). These innovations shall account for co-benefits (e.g., health promotion) and the "Do No Significant Harm” (DNSH) principle.
- Activities to support climate-neutrality to establish new knowledge and build capacity and capabilities of city government and associated local actors through training, workshops, and other forms of learning.
- Activities aiming to build more collaborative communities, to advance new governance models at city level, and to engage citizens (including vulnerable/marginalised groups) and enable them to act on climate change in a systemic and cross-sectoral manner.
Please note: proposed interventions may cover several or all of these descriptions of eligible activities – this list is intended to allow for flexibility in proposing interventions, rather than limiting proposed interventions to any one eligible activity alone.
Applicants will be requested at the point of submitting a proposal to describe and declare the links between their proposed interventions and the eligible activities as listed above.
For more information please refer to the Call Guidelines.