Looking for partners: HORIZON-CL6-2025-03-GOVERNANCE-02

You can check a part of our project concept note below;

PROBLEM STATEMENT

Across Europe, a growing array of sustainability-linked financial mechanisms—Payments for Ecosystem Services (PES), CAP eco-schemes, biodiversity credits, landscape carbon contracts—have been piloted. Yet their transformative potential remains unrealized.

The core issue is not a lack of instruments. It is the failure to embed them into a coherent, scalable, and institutionalized payment logic.

Ecosystems are relational. Current payments are transactional.

These instruments:

• Operate in institutional and territorial silos;

• Remain project-based or subsidy-dependent;

• Lack interoperability and alignment across governance levels;

• Struggle to convert ecosystem outcomes into stable, outcome-linked disbursements.

As a result, Horizon-funded innovations remain fragmented, unable to scale, replicate, or sustain without continued external support.

PROPOSED SOLUTION

We propose to develop and operationalize a systemic architecture for outcome-aligned, ecosystem-integrated payment flows, enabling institutions at multiple levels to coordinate, align, and embed nature and climate logic into how capital moves.

This project will not add another tool to the landscape. It will build the structural logic that makes existing tools work together—across financing programs, verification systems, and governance structures.

CONSORTIUM ROLES AND IDEAL PARTNERS

We have a project coordinator already. The coordinator will also take part in analyzing the current governance landscape of agri-environmental payment schemes across Europe.

We have defined the following roles listed below. We are open to debate any positions listed below (the lead partners for 1,3 and 4 are determined but additional contribution can still be evaluated)

1. Project Coordination

2. Payment Schemes Governance Diagnostics

3. Financial Mechanisms Structuring

4. MRV for Results-Based Verification (Agcurate will lead this role)

5. Territorial Hosts/Use Case Managers for Pilots (x4-6)

   • France (to-be-confirmed, TBC)

   • Serbia (confirmed)

   • Romania (confirmed)

   • Lithuania (to-be-confirmed, TBC)

   • Use Case 5 - TBD

6. Legal & Policy & Social Systems Analysis and Model Development

   • A partner experienced in providing legal counseling to the farmers or solid policy recommendations to the-decision on agri-environmental payment schemes will be highly favored.

7. Communication & Dissemination & Exploitation 

   • Communication of Project Activities (assisting role can be given)

   • Dissemination of project results (assisting role can be given)

   • Cascade Funding Call Management (Exploitation) - This role is covered (i.e we do not need a partner here)

   • Mobilisation of Private Financing (Exploitation) - This role is still open. It is highly important for us since the call requests this explicity. We need a partner either manages (funds) for sustainable agriculture-oriented investments OR has a good network with private finance (banks, pension funds, private investors) willing to invest in sustainable agriculture space.