Regional Council of Lapland

The Regional Council of Lapland manages regional development and is responsible for drafting the regional development strategies and programmes, planning the regional development actions. RCL is the management authority for ERDF in the northern Finland. RCL is also in in charge of the Regional planning strategy, which consists of the regional development plan, a regional land use plan governing other use of land in the area, and the regional strategic programme. RCL is the funding authority of the operational programme, setting the priorities for the ERDF funding and is responsible for coordinating, monitoring and updating of the S3 in Lapland.

The main focus of S3 for Lapland is the balanced use of the Arctic natural resources and conditions. One of the specific priorities is to develop new business concepts for Lapland’s industrial and mining service companies and to support the creation of new products and services. The challenge is to push the sector development into the next level, bringing the ownership of the innovation projects among the SMEs and to move on from the small scale models or pilot projects to large scale, close to market projects in which a range of solutions are tested under real-life conditions.