PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

327
1. The Community assistance financed under ISPA shall include projects, stages of a
project which are technically and financially independent, groups of projects or project
schemes in the field of environment or transport, hereinafter referred to collectively as
“measures”. A stage of a project may also cover preliminary, feasibility and technical
studies needed for carrying out a project.
2. The Community shall provide assistance under ISPA in the light of the objectives
mentioned in Article 1 for the following:
[(a) environmental measures]; (b) transport infrastructure measures which promote
sustainable mobility, and in particular those that constitute projects of common
interest based on the criteria of Decision No 1692/96/EC and those which enable the
beneficiary countries to comply with the objectives of the Accession Partnerships; this
includes interconnection and interoperability of national networks as well as with the
trans-European networks together with access to such networks. 16
Note that no particular reference is made to either the TINA backbone or the
TINA additional network.
Nevertheless, commission representatives repeatedly
emphasized that ISPA transport funding is to be primarily allocated towards major
infrastructure investments along the Helsinki Corridors. It is therefore interesting to see
how this particular wording has since reappeared in somewhat different phrasings in
several less official Commission documents designed to explain the eligibility of ISPA.
The wording in the DG Regio’s document “ISPA mandate, programming and
implementation – State of Play” is still very close to the phrasing in the regulation (see
Commission of the European Communities 2000a). The same can be said about the
wording on the official website of the European Delegation in Poland. 17
16 This article re-appears as Article 3 in a Council regulation clarifying the relationship between ISPA and
PHARE. Article 2 of this “Council Regulation (EC) No 1266/1999 of 21 June 1999 on coordinating aid to
the applicant countries in the framework of the pre-accession strategy and amending Regulation (EEC) No
3906/89” (Council of the European Communities 1999) amends the Phare Regulation as follows:
Regulation (EEC) No 3906/89 is hereby amended by adding a new paragraph 3 to Article 3 to read as
follows:
For applicant countries with accession partnerships with the European Union, funding under the
PHARE programme shall focus on the main priorities for the adoption of the acquis communautaire, i.e.
building up the administrative and institutional capacities of the applicant States and investment, except
for the type of investments financed in accordance with Regulations (EC) No 1267/1999 (*) and (EC)
No 1268/1999 (**). PHARE funding may also be used to finance the measures in the fields of
environment, transport and agricultural and rural development which form an incidental but
indispensable part of integrated industrial reconstruction or regional development programmes.
17 The exact wording in the DG Regio document is as follows: