EU should recognise Malta's unique territorial needs - Clint Camilleri

Minister for Gozo and Planning Clint Camilleri has called on the European Union to adopt a more flexible and tailored approach to cohesion policy that recognises the unique needs of small island states like Malta.

Addressing the Informal Meeting of Ministers responsible for Cohesion Policy in Warsaw, Poland, Camilleri highlighted Malta’s specific challenges and urged the EU to avoid a one-size-fits-all policy model that disproportionately favours larger, metropolitan regions.

He pointed out that Malta needs a different approach to territorial policy: "Our focus is not on addressing internal interregional disparities, but on ensuring that EU policies recognise and respect the spatial and administrative constraints of small Member States,” he said. 

Camilleri warned against the unequal distribution of EU funds, stressing that the current system too often favours metropolitan regions at the expense of smaller, peripheral, or structurally disadvantaged territories. He called for “tailor-made and proportionate solutions” that account for Malta’s limited scale, capacity and insularity.

Highlighting The Challenges of Specific Territories, Camilleri noted that small island states face persistent structural disadvantages including limited connectivity, small market size, and constrained human resources. “The island of Gozo experiences great challenges that remain marginal in many evaluations and instruments at EU level,” he said, urging the EU to recognise insularity “not as an exception but as a structural condition requiring consistent support.”

On Territorial Tools and Governance Mechanisms, the minister noted that EU mechanisms like Territorial Impact Assessments and functional area approaches were often irrelevant in Malta’s context. “In the case of Malta, what we need are flexible and lightweight mechanisms that avoid imposing assumptions about scale, institutional layers, or administrative capacity that do not reflect our national reality,” he said.

He also called for more granular EU data collection and better support for adaptive governance structures suited to micro-states. “The principles of shared management, multi-level governance, and place-based development must remain central,” he said.

Camilleri concluded by urging the EU to ensure that future cohesion policy is guided by “coherence, simplification and relevance” to ensure it supports, rather than restricts, the development of smaller territories like Malta.