WRITTEN QUESTION P-3394/01

by Marianne Eriksson (GUE/NGL) to the Commission

(6 December 2001)

Subject: ADAPT

During the last budgetary period the Community initiative ADAPT was a transnational development programme co-financed by the European Social Fund to the amount of 1600 million, with a further 1 700 million in funding being provided in the Member States. A sum of nearly 3 400 million was spent by 3 680 project organisers.

Projects included lifelong learning, skills development, IT at the workplace, equality, etc. With all due respect to follow-up, annual reports, and final reports, the most important point is that the lessons are learnt and the results and findings of the projects should be applied even after the projects have been completed.

It has been said that the Commission did not collect or organise the results produced by the projects. It would rather seem that when EUROPS, the European support body working on the Commission's behalf, closed down, the material collected was destroyed.

Is this a fair description of events? How will the Commission ensure that this does not happen again and where is the discarded information to be found?

Answer given by Mrs Diamantopoulou on behalf of the Commission

(28 January 2002)

The Commission has indeed made significant efforts to exchange, disseminate, and evaluate the results of the ADAPT Community Initiative.

In this context, the Commission provided tools and platforms for the exchange of experience, as well as technical support, notably through its Technical Assistance Office Europs, which assisted Member States and the Commission:

- in preparing the ADAPT transnational week on work organisation, organised in 25 locations throughout Europe in October 2000, which was used as a forum to collect and present training products as well as Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) software;

- in supporting the management of Thematic Focus Groups, with the aim of stimulating European-level activities that are based on Member States' thematic experience and results;

- in drafting a set of principal lessons from ADAPT projects presented in the framework of the four pillars of the employment strategy;

- in producing a series of thematic reports (Innovation series), complemented by descriptions of good practice project examples, and by a data base with reference data to all ADAPT projects (now on the Commission's EQUAL website).

When Europs closed down in June 2000, all relevant documentation was transferred to the Commission, and the electronic project database was transferred to the Europa-server (http://europa. eu. int/comm/equal/index_en. html). The rest of Europs' archive, including a large number of duplicate or outdated files and project related documents, was properly disposed of.

This approach is now being pursued further by the Member States and the Commission who are continuing to build on the experience of ADAPT and Employment. The Commission has asked Member States to draw together examples of products and methodologies which work best under ADAPT and Employment, with specific focus on the outcomes that they consider as relevant for a European-wide dissemination. Good practice case studies will be shown at a major event to be organised by the Commission in mid-2002, with a view to disseminating what should be learnt from the previous Community Initiatives and what could inform the content of some EQUAL activities.

It should nevertheless be stressed that the transfer of ADAPT results to a broader range of users is first and foremost the responsibility of the Member States. This follows from the principle of subsidiarity, according to which experiments and tests funded under ADAPT, like any other European Social Fund (ESF) intervention, have been implemented through Member State programmes and actions, reflecting national needs and priorities.

For the EQUAL Community Initiative, the Commission defined mainstreaming as one of the key principles. Mainstreaming relates to a process that includes identifying lessons, clarifying the innovative element and approach that produced the results, their dissemination, validation and transfer. In order to organise mainstreaming of EQUAL on a broader scale and in all directions, the Commission is currently establishing European Thematic Groups at European level which will draw together and share the good practice which has been identified by the Member States thus contributing to the development of European employment and social inclusion policies.