Science|Business: No more New European Bauhaus Mission

Science|Business article 28 Nov 2023 by Goda Naujokaitytė

New plan on the way for Commission’s green culture initiative after member states say no to sixth research Mission

The New European Bauhaus Mission (NEB) won’t be seeing the light of day after member states jointly said no to the European Commission’s proposal.

Instead, the Commission’s green culture initiative will be given more structure and funding through a separate work programme in Horizon Europe from 2025 onwards, according to insiders. This is meant to give the initiative, until now funded through ad-hoc actions in Horizon Europe and other programmes, more stability, grounding and visibility.

The decision marks a win for member states over the Commission’s appetite for new Horizon Europe instruments. The Commission proposed idea in July, as part of its first assessment of the Missions, a novel approach to research programming which uses seed funding to inspire continent-wide action to address societal challenges.

The assessment was positive but acknowledged the Missions are still getting off the ground. The member states weren’t convinced launching a sixth one before the first five have had a chance to prove themselves was a good idea.

The newly proposed structure for the new Bauhaus is more traditional. Next year, NEB will become a ‘destination’ under Pillar 2 of Horizon Europe, which funds big collaborative research projects.

The new ‘destination’ will have a budget of €20 million for five calls for projects. The topics include transforming neighbourhoods, regenerative design, leveraging new bio-based materials, the impact of the built environment of social relations, and governance models for the co-design of neighbourhoods. One of the calls will also fund a project setting up a knowledge sharing tool for NEB.

From 2025, all this will be consolidated further in a new work programme dedicated to the green culture initiative. This will be branded as a ‘NEB Facility’ but will essentially serve as a package of various projects around the topic.

The structure, insiders say, is similar to the one-off €1 billion Green Deal call the Commission ran in 2020, at the end of the last EU research programme.

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