By Antonio Tejeda Encinas Lawyer Ph. D. Law of the European Union
In the weeks leading up to the presentation of the Multiannual Financial Framework 2028-2034, scheduled by the European Commission on 16 July 2025, a debate has been revived whose legal and institutional significance directly affects the architecture of European cohesion: the possible recentralisation of the management of the structural funds. Under the technical guise of “administrative simplification” or “performance efficiency”, a proposal for a concentration of competence in the Member States is hidden which, if it is successful, could lead to the erosion of the principle of shared management, thereby blurring the effective participation of the regions and thereby infringing the very logic of Article 349 of the Treaty on European Union. Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).
The attempt to transfer the governance model used during the implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Mechanism to the cohesion system cannot be considered neutral. The difference between the two contexts is substantive. The Next Generation EU plan was born with an approach of urgency and exceptionality, typical of a health emergency situation. In contrast, cohesion policy is structural, programmatic, long-term, and its effectiveness rests on territorial adaptation, on the capacity to adapt to the specific environment of each Region. To affirm that the national scheme is replicable without distortion at the regional level is to ignore — or deliberately circumvent — the legal pillars on which the right of cohesion has been built. In addition to this, Article 174 TFEU, which enshrines the reduction of regional disparities as an essential objective of cohesion policy, and which requires a differentiated and territorialised approach such as is now intended to be diluted.
This is where Article 349 TFEU acquires its instrumental value and strategic validity. The precept is not a concession, but a mandate. In recognizing the permanent structural conditions affecting the outermost regions (RUP) — remoteness, insularity, small area, dependence on limited sectors, etc. — the Treaty requires differentiated and sustained measures, both in economic and administrative terms. In fact, the case law of the Court of Justice has been reinforcing a functional interpretation of this Article, on the understanding that any measure affecting these regions must assess the differential impact it could have (STJUE, C-132/14, Commission v. France, among others).
The proposal for recentralization, although not yet formulated in a normative way, raises questions of a constitutional and statutory nature. From the Spanish perspective, Article 149.1.13 EC entrusts the State with the coordination of the general planning of economic activity, but does not exclude the participation of the Autonomous Communities in the implementation of European policies. The Canarian Statute of Autonomy (EAC), both in its Article 8 and in its Article 27, devotes the differentiated attention to the insular reality and to the specificities derived from its outermost condition. And it does so not only as a political declaration, but as a mandate of institutional and budgetary design.
Therefore, removing or weakening the mechanisms that guarantee such active regional participation — such as monitoring committees, own management units or direct channels with the Commission — would be both as an emptying of operational content what Article 349 TFEU establishes as the legal core of the recognition of the outermost region.
The question is not, therefore, to ask for exceptional treatment, but to maintain a functional and legal balance already consolidated, and the outermost regions do not require privileges but guarantees. Article 3.3 of the Treaty on European Union reinforces this requirement by recognising economic, social and territorial cohesion as one of the Union’s aims, which requires any reform to be interpreted from the prism of effective solidarity between regions. And the current framework, with its imperfections, has enabled — thanks to Article 349 TFEU precisely — to build a direct technical and political dialogue between the ORs and the European institutions.
In addition to this, there is an essential consideration: democratic legitimacy; regional institutions are not administrative delegations; they are governments with their own legitimacy, with normative and executive capacity, and with direct mandate from their citizens. Reducing their role in the management of European funds means disavowing that legitimacy and violating the principle of subsidiarity as set out in Article 5 of the Treaty on European Union.
Therefore, in the face of the technocratic temptation to simplify the complex, the legal and political response of the Canary Islands — and of the ORs as a whole — must be clear: Article 349 TFEU must not be updated, reinterpreted or conditioned; it must continue to be applied fully, as a guarantee of territorial balance and as a structural clause for European cohesion which, if it is to be real, cannot be uniform.
Any attempt to recentralize must be read not as a functional evolution but as an institutional step backwards. Cohesion policy, without direct participation by the Regions, ceases to be political in order to become mere financial distribution. And Europe cannot afford to weaken its most powerful tool of territorial integration precisely when it is most necessary.
The Canary Islands, as an island region, outermost, remote and fragile, is not a problem to be corrected: it is a reality to be respected. And that respect begins with the fulfilment of Article 349 TFEU in its own terms, without reinterpretations that serve as a shortcut to political decisions of recentralization.
Antonio Tejeda Encinas Doctor of Juridical Science (SJD) / Doctor iuris – Central European University, Summa cum laude (Budapest, 2014): “Legal instruments of regulatory harmonisation and regulatory sovereignty: a study applied between the EU, Latin America and Turkey (2008–2014)”
