PNRR, Cohesion Policies and the Use of European Funds: a project to promote awareness and civic monitoring
What is civic monitoring and why it is needed: especially in European projects
In the Guide we often talk about project monitoring and evaluation, because these are key processes for understanding whether a project has achieved its goals and whether the resources it has committed have been well spent.
For this, there are numerous articles in the Guide and an entire section devoted to monitoring and evaluation in European projects. In 2025, collaboration was also initiated with ASVAPP, Association for the Development of Evaluation and Analysis of Public Policy, to develop an even more in-depth content series on this topic ( their first article here).
In this article we want to tell you about civic monitoring, an approach promoted by the European Union to improve citizens’ knowledge of the use of European funds in their local organisations.
A commonplace recurs in today’s media discourse that European funds “are spent badly” or that there is no transparency about how they are used. But how much knowledge do we really have about European funds and the projects they finance? How many of us really know whether, and to what extent, European funds contribute to the development of local organisations and improve the lives of citizens?
Civic monitoring helps counter this “communication deficit” by informing and involving citizens firsthand in project monitoring. It aims to increase transparency about the use of resources and improve public decision-making through a plurality of vantage points. One of the most interesting experiences in Italy is that of Monithon, an independent initiative that has been developing methods and tools for civic monitoring of public funds since 2013. On the organization’s website and Youtube channel there is a lot of in-depth information and many concrete examples of civic monitoring carried out in our country.
The European Union supports and encourages civic monitoring through specific programs such as Information Measures for the EU Cohesion policy(IMREG), managed by DG REGIO. Let’s take a closer look at what this is all about and find out together about AwareEU, one of the projects funded by this very program.
AwareEU: bridging the information gap on the use of European funds
AwareEU (Achieve Wide Awareness of EU REsults) is a project implemented by Action Aid Italia together with info.nodes, onData APS and Monithon, four civic realities committed to promoting transparency and active participation. It was funded by the European program “IMREG – Information measures for the EU Cohesion policy 2022.”
The project aims to bridge the information gap between the citizenry and European institutions by developing and disseminating user-friendly content on Cohesion Policy and the NRP. It promotes bottom-up data collection and civic monitoring of projects financed with these funds, in three main areas: Environment, Urban Policies and Social Inclusion.
We present below a brief review of the very rich material produced by AwareEU and available on the project site: video pills, podcasts, infographics, courses, surveys and events. Resources that can be accessed online and, most importantly, developed in accessible language designed even for the layman. To understand what civic monitoring is, how to adopt it on your own projects and how to participate in initiatives in this area.
AwareEU: lots of information materials to understand how PNRR and Cohesion Policy work
The first step in engaging citizens is to inform. What is the NRP really all about? How can the Structural Funds and the NRP improve our lives? How can we make our voices heard with respect to their use? How can we activate a civic monitoring initiative? These are some of the questions that AwareEU answers with these 4 short videos designed for the layman, available in the videopills section of the project website:
- What is PNRR and how it works
- What Cohesion Policies are and how they work
- What is OpenCoesione? Find out how European funds are spent
- What is civic monitoring? Find out how you can do it, too
In addition to videopills, the AwareEU website features a series of interesting infographics developed from data from OpenCoesione, the “open government” initiative on Cohesion Policies in Italy:
- #1 Projects completed late
- #2 Completed projects VS completion time
- #3 Projects funded on the theme of the environment
- #4 Projects funded to combat hydrogeological instability
- #5 Four sectors compared over 20 years
- #6 The five biggest projects that have been completed
- #7 Funding by province VS unemployment
- #8 The 15 most EU-funded rivers.
- #9 How funds are invested for social and health
- #10 The comparison between projects in different EU programs
A data journalism and investigative journalism course to talk about European funds
AwareEU contributes not only to disseminating, but also to producing accurate information on the use of funds within projects funded by the NRP and Cohesion Policies. Therefore, the project developed an online data journalism course for journalists and aspiring journalists to provide new tools and methods for information analysis and storytelling of European funds in local organisations. The course, taught by journalists and experts, was held between June and November 2024, and included a basic and an advanced course. All lectures were recorded and are available on the project website and the info.nodes Youtube channel.
The basic course includes:
- Lesson 1 – European Funds. How they work, how to monitor them, and which projects to look into : This lesson offers a session on PNRR funds and a session on Cohesion Policy funds;
- Lesson 2 – From idea to implementation. What to do, how to do it, when to do it: this lesson offers an in-depth look at how to build an inquiry, a session on how to read a Chamber of Commerce survey, and a session on how to read a financial statement;
- Lecture 3 – Open data and data journalism;
- Lesson 4 – Working the data by hand;
- Lesson 5 – Access to information.
The advanced course includes:
- Lesson 1 – Photos and video for reportage
- Lesson 2 – How to develop an international field report
- Lesson 3 – Data Journalism Techniques and Methods.
- Lesson 4 – Collecting and analyzing Opencoesione data.
- Lesson 5 – Data scraping: practical exercise
- Lesson 6 – Decolonizing the language of journalism
As part of the project, participants under 35 in the basic course were able to submit investigative proposals on European-funded projects selected by Monithon. Eight of these proposals, screened by an independent editorial board, received a financial endowment and mentoring from a panel of experts to develop their inquiry to publication.
Six of the inquiries have already been published in newspapers and periodicals such as Domani, L’Espresso, Scomode, IrpiMedia, and BikeItalia, and are fully available in the Inquiries section of the AwareEU website. These inquiries have been collected in the publication “Seen Up Close – civic monitoring and investigative journalism to tell the story of European funds,” which also includes other project outputs, such as infographics.
AwareEU podcasts: an audio journey to do “My Part”
Also very interesting, to delve into concrete experiences of civic monitoring in European projects, is the podcast “My Part,” developed by AwareEU (specifically ActionAid) in collaboration with Chora Media. Its goal is to draw attention to how each of us can make a difference, and to make it clear that European policy, although it seems far away, is much closer to our daily lives than it seems.
“My Part” tells the stories of active citizenship and civic monitoring experience of students from four Italian high schools, focusing on as many European projects in the areas of land redevelopment, gender equality and environmental protection. We reproduce the list of episodes, which are also available on the AwareEU website.
- Episode 1: Five stories of active citizenship: the first episode explores tools and practices for monitoring the use of European funds that can support the creation of a more informed connection to European policies.
- Episode 2: Going Far, Together: The second episode takes us through the Taranto Mar Piccolo reclamation project through the voices of students from Pacinotti Technical Institute.
- Episode 3: Looking to the Future of the Environment: the third tells us about the securing of the Potenza River in the Marche region through monitoring by students from the Macerata Agricultural Institute.
- Episode 4: Franca Viola’s Sentinels: students from the Liceo Artistico Sabatini Menna high school in Salerno talk about monitoring a project to transform a property confiscated from the Mafia into a shelter for women victims of violence.
- Episode 5: Keepers of our Glaciers: the last episode takes us with two students from the Bolzano Institute of Technology on their project to monitor South Tyrol’s glaciers.
Aware EU: the other initiatives in the local organisations
In the “News” and “Events” sections of the AwareEU website, it is possible to learn about events and initiatives launched by the project, all of which are aimed at informing citizens and promoting civic participation in “bottom-up” data collection on European projects funded by the NRP and Cohesion Policies in their local organisations. These include, for example:
- the #Europaintornoate online photo contest, which invites citizens and civil society organizations to share images of Cohesion Policy or NRP-funded projects currently underway in their local organisations;
- public events held in Milan, Palermo, and Rome, in different contexts, which addressed topics such as the role of civil society and investigative journalism in monitoring European funds, the challenge of communicating European funds to citizens, civic monitoring, and investigative journalism in the narrative of European funds.
Communicating Europe: the policy brief and challenges for the future
The policy brief , “Communicating Europe, Challenges for the Dissemination of European Policies, Between Transparency and Civic Involvement”(downloadable from the website), is another important product of the AwareEU project: it is the result of a participatory process, bringing together recommendations for institutions and the world of communication and media to strengthen the link between European citizens and institutions.
We will devote an upcoming interview to an in-depth look at other initiatives related to civic monitoring, transparency and accountability, through an account of the experience of ActionAid Italia, the lead partner in this project.
Meanwhile, the materials produced by AwareEU illustrate to us with positive examples what civic monitoring applied to European funds and projects is and how it works. They too, like all human activities, can change and improve thanks to the interest and healthy monitoring of citizens and citizens: a responsibility, an opportunity and a challenge that all “insiders” are called upon to take up.
