While the overall budget and the regulation establishing Erasmus+ programme are co-legislated by the European Parliament (EP) and the Council of the European Union, the European Commission is responsible for determining the implementation details, such as the Annual Work Programme (AWP) that outlines concrete funding levels for each action. As the Directorate General for Education, Culture, Youth and Sports (DG EAC) and the Programme Committee, composed of representatives from Member States, determine the practical implementation, a policy note “Strengthening Monitoring, Parliamentary Oversight and Stakeholder Inclusion in the Implementation of the Erasmus+ Programme” put forward by Rene A.G. Teunissen, Senior Policy Advisor at Erasmus University Rotterdam, and a member of the EUF Steering Committee, showcases how beneficiaries and stakeholders are not involved.
This poses two major challenges. On one hand, the EP as one of the co-legislators has little to no power to influence the funding allocation within the programme and has little oversight once the programme regulation has been approved. On the other, beneficiaries have no formalised avenues for meaningful interventions about the programme scope and design, or its budgetary allocations.
On the Parliament’s side, there is a noticeable shift as we get ready for the next funding and programming period starting in 2028. While considerable attention is directed at the funding levels, and the need to match the programme’s ambitions, several political groups are putting forward amendments and views that would mitigate certain governance issues of Erasmus+ programme while also calling for stronger parliamentary oversight.
Some avenues already exist for the EP to receive information from the European Commission. Not least through written questions, yet no obligations exist for DG EAC to report to the EP and its CULT committee as one of the co-legislators, and even in cases of reporting, the data is not disaggregated by sectors, and no policy analysis is carried out to fully map the attainment (or lack thereof) of certain programme indicators. Timely and purposeful reporting would allow EP to promptly intervene and ensure the programme is meeting its objectives. However, in doing so, it’s important to ensure that the co-legislators aren’t drawn into operational implementation details instead of retaining a distinctly political role.
However, it’s not only about Parliamentary monitoring and oversight. The Programme Committee is responsible for approving the AWP, as proposed by the Commission, yet the draft becomes public facing only after the Committee has delivered a positive opinion, often meaning it is too late for the Parliament and the beneficiaries to intervene. Shifting the regulatory logic would give the Parliament a formal right to object and the power to revoke the delegation at any time, should that be necessary.
Structured reporting obligations and parliamentary consultation create predictability for Commission’s work programmes, reduce the risk of late-stage political disputes, and provide institutional legitimacy for implementation decisions.
The policy note “Strengthening Monitoring, Parliamentary Oversight and Stakeholder Inclusion in the Implementation of the Erasmus+ Programme” further analyses the institutional relationships between the EP, its Committee on Culture and Education (CULT), the European Commission and comitology structures in relation to the monitoring and implementation of Erasmus+.
The policy note identifies three structural tensions:
- Information asymmetry between the Commission and the Parliament: an asymmetry compounded in Erasmus+ by its decentralised delivery model and the absence of Parliament-oriented reporting obligations;
- The ex- post nature of parliamentary oversight;
- Structural separation between technical monitoring and democratic accountability.
There is a fourth, cross-cutting weakness: the weak institutionalisation of practice-based evidence from stakeholders and end users.
From these, the note derives four concrete governance objectives that structure the proposed policy response.
These four objectives are:
- Strengthen the information position and analytical capacity of the CULT Committee, in that parliamentary scrutiny is based on timely, policy-relevant data rather than technical reporting alone.
- Enhance early and meaningful parliamentary involvement in implementation-related decisions, moving the Parliament’s role upstream in the annual programme cycle.
- Improve coherence between technical monitoring and political accountability, ensuring that the outputs of comitology and EACEA management are systematically connected to democratic scrutiny.
- Institutionalise the inclusion of stakeholder and end-user experience in Erasmus+ governance, transforming an episodic and consultative practice into a structural feature of monitoring and oversight, and a key enabling condition for sound decision-making in programme design and implementation.
The fourth objective directly addresses the knowledge gaps that currently exist. A significant share of Erasmus+ implementation knowledge resides with stakeholders and practitioners who engage with the programme on a daily basis, and are directly affected by the decisions made behind closed doors. Their involvement in the decision making process stands to significantly improve the governance of the programme and could help avoid costly mistakes that are otherwise more likely to happen.This would also help improve how information about changing rules are circulated across programme countries, which would greatly reduce frustration among the beneficiaries.
The stakeholder engagement currently can be described as very fragmented, ad-hoc, and not fully connected to the decision making process. While some responsibility lies with the stakeholders and beneficiaries to share the knowledge and represent their own interests, without formal avenues for input or political will to listen, the expertise remains obstructed.
Timely and meaningful involvement of Europe-wide stakeholder organisations that have independent institutional standing and direct representational ties to universities, students and practitioners could lead to a more coherent programme that fits the needs of the beneficiaries and the community at large.
A step in the direction to improve the stakeholder involvement and build on their expertise has already been proposed by the Lifelong Learning Platform. An Erasmus+ Civil Dialogue Group could be set up with beneficiaries of both centralised and decentralised actions in the Erasmus+ Programme.
In addition to the fragmented consultation process, another aspect to highlight is the weak and oftentimes nonexistent feedback loops, limiting the understanding of how the stakeholder contributions are taken into account. Changing the narrative to not only consulting the experts and providing an opportunity to voice concerns: the process also needs to be complemented by the obligation to answer feedback, providing evidence as to why feedback may or may not be implemented, ensuring a higher level of engagement and accountability on both the stakeholder and decision maker sides.
In the policy note, Teunissen proposes the following principles to guide effective stakeholder and end-user inclusion in Erasmus+ governance:
- Continuity: engagement should be ongoing rather than episodic;
- Representativeness: input should reflect diverse sectors, regions and target groups, including sport organisations and practitioners alongside education and youth stakeholders;
- Policy relevance: feedback should be structured and linked to programme objectives;
- Transparency: stakeholders should be informed how their input is used and what follow-up action is taken;
- Complementarity: qualitative experience should complement quantitative monitoring data.
As the new programming period places a greater emphasis on simplifying the institutional architecture of the EU activities, it cannot come at the expense of transparency and democratic accountability. Already in the current funding period, the budgetary pressure has led to decisions which sowed confusion among the community. And going forward, this pressure does not reduce the need for structured stakeholder involvement and Parliamentary oversight in the Erasmus+ governance, it strengthens it. In a rapidly changing world, the Erasmus+ programme must be able to adapt with it, however not without taking into account the institutional realities that drive the programme forward.
The full policy note may be accessed here.