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Association to Horizon Europe is the closest form of international cooperation in Horizon Europe. Entities of Associated Countries can participate in the Horizon Europe calls under the same conditions as entities from the EU Member States and are therefore eligible for funding, unless specific limitations or conditions are laid down in the work programme and/or call topic text.
Not only EU neighbouring countries can apply for association, any country in the world with a strong research and innovation capacity that share common values with Europe can apply for association to Horizon Europe.
There are 4 categories of countries eligible for association with Horizon Europe:
Close to the start of the Association, transitional measures can be set in place, through which entities of these countries can already be included as beneficiaries in call topics. Details are mentioned in the Horizon Europe Programme Guide.
When involving stakeholders from recently associated countries (e.g. Switzerland and South Korea) in a proposal, it has been reported that a warning may appear in the Funding & Tenders Portal submission system though the eligibility conditions are met: “The call requires at least three participants from three different EU Member States or associated countries”. The European Commission confirmed that this warning is linked to the current technical configuration of the submission system and does not reflect the respective associated country status. You can always revise the Country eligibility tool on our website to revise the status of countries. If indeed the country is associated, then the warning can be ignored, provided that the final consortium complies with the minimum eligibility conditions at submission stage.
All details regarding country eligibility is compiled in the infosheet “International cooperation".
The Miricle project, ‘Mine Risk Clearance for Europe’, obtained funding under the European Defence Industrial Development programme call ‘Underwater control contributing to resilience at sea’. The main objective of the project was to achieve a European and sovereign capacity in future mine warfare and create a path for the next generation ‘made in Europe’ countermeasure solutions. In order to realise this objective, Miricle addressed various stages: studies, design, prototyping and testing. These stages inter alia included the successful testing of an XL Unmanned Underwater Vehicle, a protototyped mine disposal system and multiple innovative systems to detect buried mines. Flanders Marine Institute (VLIZ), was one of the five Belgian partners in the consortium. Within the project, VLIZ was able to forward its research on the acoustic imaging of the seabed to spatially map and visualize buried structures and objects - in this case buried mines - in the highest possible detail. VLIZ also led the work on ‘Port and Offshore Testing’, building on the expertise of the institute in the field of marine operations and technology.
