Horizon Europe Policy Support Facility

Since 2015, the Horizon Policy Support Facility gives Member States and countries associated to Framework Programmes practical support to design, implement and evaluate reforms that enhance the quality of their research and innovation investments, policies and systems. The Horizon Europe Policy Support Facility, launched in February 2021 and financed from the WIDERA Work Programme, provides good practice, independent high-level expertise and guidance at the request of Member States and Associated Countries through a number of services:

PSF Country (formerly PSF Peer Reviews & Specific support to countries) is an in-depth assessments of a country's R&I system (or of parts of it) carried out by a panel of experts and peers and leading to actionable policy recommendations to the national authorities on reforms necessary to strengthen their R&I system. Three countries have been assessed recently – Moldova, Greece and Croatia.

PSF Challenge includes the PSF Mutual Learning Exercises (MLE) and is focused on specific and operational R&I challenges of interest to several volunteering countries. It aims to identify good practice, lessons learned and success factors. The recent result of MLE is the thematic report on „Scaling up citizen science“ available here. The MLE targets EU Missions, industrial decarbonisation or knowledge valorisation.

PSF Open aims to accommodate a wider range of policy needs and to address on-demand requests that do not fall under the “Country” or “Challenge” category of activities. It provides greater flexibility in providing tailor-made approaches to address the country’s' request by more direct support. Recently, Romania and Greece benefited from this service.