The Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries, Food and the Environment, has prepared a guide aimed at land stewardship entities and rural management and conservation organizations, to guide them in accessing European funds for the period 2014-2020.

Land stewardship has many opportunities for financing in European funds, and they can involve stewardship entities and networks, in addition to most of their interlocutors and collaborators. Stewardship is particularly positioned to facilitate the involvement of a wide variety of agents from rural areas and territories and can make a significant contribution to participatory and responsible research and innovation. These reasons, among others, have led the Biodiversity Foundation to promote this guide that contains detailed basic information to find out about access to European funding.

The guide provides a large number of links to sources of information and practical examples that complement and expand the contents. The collections presented in the publication are numerous and of diverse focus: creation, health, justice, research, learning, etc. However, they can be divided into two broad categories: Structural Funds: jointly managed by the European Commission and its Member States; in Spain, the autonomous communities that establish programmes or operational plans to apply these funds are also involved. They include agricultural-rural, maritime-fisheries, regional and social development funds. Funds directly managed by the European Commission: majority in number and sectoral in orientation and with a marked European and transnational vocation.

The guide is eminently practical and is structured in five sections. Each of them offers a summary at the beginning that facilitates different levels of reading and guidance on the usefulness and content of the section in question. The publication offers a menu of working methods and procedures for the selection, analysis and preparation of European projects. It has a proposal of possible steps and different methodological frameworks that accompany it. It also includes opinions and suggestions from networks and custodian entities useful when preparing proposals for European calls.