CapaCITIES 2.0 – Taking the EU Cities Mission to the Next (National) Level
National mission platforms can act as the engine rooms of urban climate action, linking local ambition with coordinated support that helps cities deliver at scale. Ahead of the CapaCITIES 2.0 consortium meeting in Torino on 26-27 May 2026, we asked members of the Cities Mission Board to share where these platforms should focus next.
More than 100 Mission Cities have now received the EU Mission Label, marking a decisive shift in the European Mission on Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities from planning to implementation. The challenge is no longer whether cities can design ambitious Climate City Contracts, but how Europe and the national level can create the governance, financing and market conditions required to deliver them at speed and scale.
Expectations are high. Cities are being called upon to act simultaneously as integrators—aligning policies across sectors such as energy, transport, and planning; conveners—mobilising public authorities, private actors, and citizens; and accelerators—testing, deploying, and scaling solutions. At a time of geopolitical tension, economic uncertainty and increasingly polarised political narratives, we also look for cities to deliver something that is becoming scarce at national levels: continuity of action.
This is against a background where cities across Europe face persistent structural barriers: fragmented funding landscapes, constrained public investment capacity, limited access to private finance, and insufficient resources for project development and structuring. This is where national mission platforms come in, with their unique capacity to translate the European ambition of the Cities Mission into coherent domestic frameworks: aligning regulation, coordinating funding streams, building project pipelines, and connecting cities to markets and investors.
The role of national mission platforms is becoming even more critical in a shifting political context. Security, energy independence, industrial competitiveness, affordable housing and supply chain resilience are increasingly shaping national priorities and public budgets. Rather than competing with climate objectives, these agendas can reinforce them – if integrated effectively. The task now is to embed the Cities Mission within national strategies and funding systems, moving from a “100 cities” initiative to a truly European transformation anchored in all Member States and catering to a growing number of mission-minded cities.
Since its inception in 2022, CapaCITIES has played a key role in building and supporting national mission platforms. To inform the next phase of CapaCITIES 2.0, we invited members of the Mission Board for Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities to share their perspectives on where national platforms should focus to achieve the greatest impact. Their reflections, presented in the contributions below, offer both strategic direction and practical insight for accelerating urban climate action across Europe.
Paulo Ferrão, Mission Board Chair: “CapaCITIES has played a key role in advancing the implementation of the EU Cities Mission by supporting the establishment of national platforms that empower cities in their transition processes. It has enhanced the preparedness and capacity of its partners to actively engage in climate transition efforts, while strengthening their ability to address country-specific barriers such as regulatory frameworks, financing mechanisms and governance structures.
Looking ahead, CapaCITIES can further reinforce its role as a key enabler of the EU Cities Mission by leveraging national platforms as true mission multipliers, expanding engagement from a small group of Mission Cities to a much broader community that can collectively accelerate the transition. Building on this, national labelling approaches can be developed and adapted in different forms to recognise and support a wider group of mission-minded cities, drawing on existing and emerging labelling frameworks in the EU and beyond, thereby consolidating and formalising this expanded engagement while increasing the overall reach and impact of the Mission.”
Maria Vassilakou: “CapaCITIES took the lead in steering multi-level governance and collaboration across several Member States: developing national platforms, convening businesses and investors, civil society and academia with public actors across national, regional and local levels, organising Climate City Contracts in multi-city project portfolios towards creating markets of scale and channelling investment as in Spain, Romania or Finland. Now let’s take the Mission to the next level: we need 27 national missions! Under the guidance of CapaCITIES, one-stop shops could be created in every Member State that provide support with maturing projects and combining funding with private capital, improving the coordination of investments, strengthening the alignment of national policies to Mission and climate objectives, advancing legal innovation (e.g. procurement and fiscal innovation), providing shared resources (e.g. frameworks for monitoring and citizen-driven action), upscaling solutions, sharing lessons and out-scaling the Mission to gradually encompass all cities across Member States.”
Françoise Guaspare: “CapaCITIES has already delivered tangible progress by structuring national platforms and fostering a community of practice that connects cities, national authorities and key stakeholders around the EU Cities Mission. In the French case, it has played a key role in consolidating an informal but effective collaboration space, enabling regular exchanges, mutual learning and the emergence of a shared narrative aligned with Mission objectives. It has also supported capacity-building for city transition teams through workshops, webinars and access to knowledge, while helping to identify key thematic priorities such as financing, governance and citizen engagement.
However, the network remains at a “consolidating” stage, so its next phase should focus on scaling impact and moving from exchange to implementation: strengthening governance structures, including clearer mandates, stronger political backing and enhanced decision-making capacity at national level. Increasing multi-level cooperation particularly with regional authorities and engaging new actors such as the private sector and financial institutions will be essential. CapaCITIES should also concentrate efforts on supporting implementation: facilitating access to public and private funding, providing concrete tools for Climate City Contracts, and developing common methodologies for decision-making, monitoring and impact assessment. Finally, fostering deeper collaboration through multi-city projects, structured workstreams and stronger policy advocacy, will be key to translating dialogue into transformative action. In short, the next step for CapaCITIES is to evolve from a platform for coordination and learning into a driver of delivery, enabling cities to accelerate their transition in a more integrated and scalable way.”
Chrysses Nicolaides: “CapaCITIES has made a significant contribution to the Cities Mission by acting as interface between the European level and the national level, while anchoring its activities in local needs. The network helped the implementation of the Cities Mission in a number of Member States by bringing together national authorities, Mission Cities and key stakeholders, highlighting common challenges in multi-level governance and in the alignment of regulation and policies.
Moving forward, CapaCITIES 2.0 should focus on deepening engagement with the national level and on strengthening the role of national mission platforms not only as coordination mechanisms, but also as operational hubs and vehicles for implementation. The network should promote the alignment of national policies to the Mission objectives, identify regulatory bottlenecks and facilitate structured dialogue with ministries of Member States. CapaCITIES 2.0 should also support national platforms in engaging more cities to adopt the Climate City Contract model, thus expanding the geographical reach of the Cities Mission across Europe and inside countries. There is tremendous potential for nationally-driven approaches. Take for instance Greece, where 85 cities expressed commitment to the objectives of the Cities Mission by signing a Memorandum of Understanding with the Ministry of Environment. A readily applicable model is the M100 Mirror Mission Hub of Romania that effectively mirrors the EU Cities Mission at national level, with national Climate Cities Contacts with the 2035 horizon and ten cities having already received a national Mission Label.
Alberto Anfossi: “CapaCITIES has played an important role in supporting technical coordination and capacity building around the EU Cities Mission in Italy, particularly through the involvement of research organisations and technical agencies. However, the Italian experience also highlights the limits of progress in the absence of a stable and politically mandated national coordination framework. To date, Italy has not yet developed a fully structured national platform for the Cities Mission. Despite several efforts to foster stronger alignment with the national government, including engagement at ministerial and Prime Minister’s Office level, political endorsement has remained fragmented and discontinuous. This confirms that technical capacity alone cannot substitute for a clear institutional mandate and sustained inter‑ministerial ownership.
At the same time, there is a positive and meaningful dynamic at the horizontal level. The nine Italian Mission Cities have developed strong peer‑to‑peer collaboration, supported by NetZeroCities, working together on Climate City Contracts, energy transition, climate finance and governance challenges. Initiatives such as the Let’sGOv Pilot Project demonstrate how cooperation among cities can sustain momentum and produce concrete progress, even in contexts of institutional uncertainty. Looking ahead, CapaCITIES could play a key role in helping countries like Italy move from informal coordination towards more structured national engagement, by supporting dialogue with national ministries, clarifying roles and responsibilities, and better connecting city‑led cooperation with national policy frameworks. Strengthening this link will be essential to scale impact and support the effective delivery of the Mission.”
Gabriela Kuštan: “Achieving climate neutrality requires a holistic approach and a well-functioning multi-level governance system in place for successful implementation. CapaCITIES plays an important role in facilitating the establishment of this system, by supporting and coordinating the creation of national platforms. These platforms, when fully operational, serve as accelerators in delivering the goals of the Cities Mission by fully engaging in the process not only Mission Cities, but also Mission-Minded Cities.
With the Cities Mission and over 100 Climate Cities Contracts now into the implementation phase, CapaCITIES 2.0 should strengthen its mandate by engaging into efforts to unblock identified barriers in the legislative, financial and operational areas. This will contribute to the smooth delivery of the Climate City Contracts and to the scaling up of lessons learned and tested solutions across Mission Cities as well as Mission-Minded Cities.”
Karolina Skog: “CapaCITIES has been instrumental in advancing the implementation of the EU Cities Mission by supporting the creation of national platforms that enable cities to drive their transition processes. National platforms have proven efficient in mobilising actors from the public and private sectors. The have also stimulated peer learning and hence strengthened the readiness and capacity of local and national partners to actively participate in climate transition efforts.
National platforms are engines for multi-level governance. It is important to continue supporting these platforms, the established ones as well as the ones still emerging. As we are getting closer to the 2030 horizon, scaling up must be a top priority. This include mobilising private actors for big-scale investments as well as implementing the knowledge that is built and accumulated through the activities and exchanges under the Cities Mission. In addition, EU Missions should connect with other mission-oriented policy initiatives across world regions and learn from their work.”
Sissy Windisch: “Germany stands out not only as one of the largest cohorts of EU Mission Cities but also as the country with the greatest replication potential across its municipalities. Right now, the lack of strong multi-level governance coordination and implementation limits the success of the Mission. This is in a context where multi-level governance is not an administrative formality, but a structural prerequisite for delivery in Germany – where climate actions are split across federal, state and municipal layers.
CapaCITIES 2.0 can play a decisive role and provide real momentum across these governance levels, sparked above all by the Mission Cities themselves. StronGER Cities, the national platform of German Mission Cities, exemplifies this. Built from the ground up by the Mission Cities, StronGER Cities has laid strong foundations for national coordination. The European support framework of CapaCITIES 2.0 can now amplify these foundations. It can also open the door to something equally powerful: peer learning. Exchanges with Austrian, Romanian, Spanish and other European colleagues can deliver solutions far beyond what national efforts alone could achieve.”
Grațian Mihăilescu: “The next big step should be to connect national mission platforms to investment pipelines. To give an example from Romania, the three EU Mission Cities and the ten additional cities selected at national level under the M100 Mirror Mission Hub now face a challenge that they share with other cities across Europe: translating action plans into investment-ready projects. National platforms are uniquely positioned to broker a connection between city project pipelines and national co-financing instruments, EIB advisory support and Cohesion Policy funds. CapaCITIES 2.0 should therefore encourage and support “investment facilitation” as a defined function of national platforms, building on the resources of and complementing the work done by NetZeroCities.
Another important step would be to move from knowledge-sharing to implementation accountability. The Learning Portfolio and peer-learning activities have been valuable, but learning without accountability loops risks becoming an end in itself. This is why CapaCITIES 2.0 should develop light-touch national progress monitoring — not bureaucratic reporting, but a shared framework through which national platforms can publicly demonstrate what enabling conditions they have put in place and which bottlenecks remain unresolved. This would also strengthen the advisory role of CapaCITIES advocacy role toward the European Commission on what national-level reforms are genuinely needed.”
Jorn Verbeeck: “From a Belgian perspective, the next phase of the EU Cities Mission should recognise cities not only as local implementers, but as strategic delivery partners in a period where climate, competitiveness, resilience and security are increasingly intertwined. Belgium illustrates both the urgency and the opportunity of this shift: cities and municipalities sit at the intersection of urban renovation, local energy transition, mobility, water management, civil protection and social cohesion, yet they operate within a highly layered federal and regional governance system that can either enable or fragment delivery. In the context of the new MFF, this makes meaningful urban participation in Belgian National and Regional Partnership Plans essential, not optional. The Belgian experience shows that local ambition is not the main bottleneck. Municipal mobilisation has been strong, for example through the Flemish Local Energy and Climate Pact, which engaged 294 of 300 municipalities with concrete climate actions and shared reporting structures. The greater challenge is continuity, scale and alignment: promising approaches such as deep social housing renovation, blue-green infrastructure, multimodal traffic management and regional mobility investment too often remain isolated projects rather than parts of pooled national or interlocal and/or regional portfolios.
This is precisely where a strengthened CapaCITIES 2.0 network and national platform logic can add value. For Belgium, the priority should be to build a mission-based governance architecture that connects federal, regional and local levels around shared investment pipelines, urban chapters in the NRPPs, pooled technical assistance, and joint procurement and financing frameworks. In a context of geopolitical pressure and political volatility, this would help anchor climate action in a wider agenda of affordability, energy autonomy, infrastructure resilience and democratic trust.”
The Cities Mission Board’s call for CapaCITIES 2.0 is to move from knowledge exchange to learning-by-doing implementation as well as to evolve from a platform for coordination into a driver of delivery. To this end, while continuing to provide support and shared resources to cities, national mission platforms should:
- Become one-stop shops for steering multi-level collaboration, policy alignment, legal and fiscal innovation, and combination of multi-city project portfolios.
- Approach investment as one of their defined functions, making it easier for cities to navigate, access and combine funding, financing and private capital.
- Organise national Labelling processes that can take the mission approach to every interested European city, in the EU Member States and Associated Countries.
In this role, CapaCITIES 2.0 can help build the implementation architecture needed in Europe for achieving urban climate neutrality and for making cities into strategic partners in the EU green transition, resilience and competitiveness agendas.