Interreg Deutschland Nederland

The border regions in Europe are the connecting links of the European Union. Through collaboration across borders, national borders in Europe will lose meaning and get less and less important. To support the cross-border cooperation between countries, The European Union has created the subsidy program INTERREG. INTERREG supports cooperation along the European borders. The European Union set up INTERREG in the 1990s under the structural funds in order to promote cross-border cooperation. It is one of the main instruments used to implement the EU’s cohesion policy – in particular its regional policy, which aims at reducing development disparities between European regions and strengthen economic cohesion. Between 2014 and 2020, the EU will invest almost 9 billion euros in cross-border cooperation across Europe. A budget with an amount of approximately 440 million euros is available for the Dutch-German cross-border region. The area covered by the INTERREG programme Deutschland – Nederland extends from the Wadden Sea to the Lower Rhine and along a 460-kilometre-long border. The programme area contains parts of the German federal states Niedersaksen and Nordrhein-Westfalen and parts of the Dutch provinces of Friesland, Groningen, Drenthe, Flevoland, Overijssel, Gelderland, Noord Brabant and Limburg. The main objectives of the programme are to increase the innovative capacity of the border region and to reduce the barrier effect of the boundary.