Horizon Europe Proposal Template: Structure, Requirements + Writing a Competitive Application

Horizon Europe is the EU's €95.5 billion research and innovation programme for 2021–2027. It funds collaborative research, innovation, and deployment projects across all scientific and technological domains — including climate, biodiversity, food systems, and environmental governance.

For NGOs working in environmental sectors, Horizon Europe offers access to substantial funding through thematic missions, partnerships, and standard calls within the European Green Deal cluster. But the application process is significantly more demanding than most national or smaller EU programme applications.

The proposal template is standardised across all Horizon Europe call types. Understanding its structure — what each section must demonstrate, where proposals most commonly fail, and how evaluation criteria are applied — is the starting point for writing a competitive application.

This guide focuses on the practical requirements of the Horizon Europe proposal template for NGOs and environmental project teams: what must be addressed, what is commonly missed, and how to build the structural foundation for a credible application.

What This Guide Covers

• The Horizon Europe proposal structure (Part A and Part B)
• Section-by-section requirements and evaluation criteria
• What distinguishes competitive from weak proposals
• Mandatory elements: Open Science, data management, ethics, gender
• Theory of change and impact pathway requirements
• How to align your project design with Horizon Europe expectations
• Key differences from LIFE and other EU programme proposals

To build the logframe, theory of change, and results framework your Horizon proposal requires:

Overview: Horizon Europe Proposal Types

Horizon Europe operates across three pillars, each relevant to environmental NGOs in different ways:

Pillar 1: Excellent Science — European Research Council (ERC) grants for frontier research. Typically for academic researchers, not NGOs.

Pillar 2: Global Challenges and European Industrial Competitiveness — The primary route for NGOs. Includes Cluster 6 (Food, Bioeconomy, Natural Resources, Agriculture and Environment) and the European Green Deal calls.

Pillar 3: Innovative Europe — European Innovation Council and the European Institute for Innovation and Technology. More relevant for organisations developing scalable solutions.

Missions — EU Missions on Climate Adaptation, Soil Health, Ocean, Smart Cities, and Cancer. Highly competitive; require clear alignment with mission-specific objectives.

Call Types

NGOs most commonly participate in RIA and IA proposals as consortium partners, and occasionally as lead applicants in CSA calls.

Horizon Europe Proposal Structure

All standard Horizon Europe proposals consist of two parts:

Part A: Administrative Information

Completed directly in the submission system (Funding & Tenders Portal). Includes:

• Project title and acronym
• Call identifier and work programme topic
• Applicant and consortium information
• Budget summary
• Ethics self-assessment
• Legal status and financial capacity

Part A is formulaic. The critical work is in Part B.

Part B: Technical Content

Part B is the written proposal, structured into three standard sections:

Section 1: Excellence Section 2: Impact Section 3: Implementation

Each section is assessed independently by evaluators. A weak score on any section creates a threshold risk.

Section 1: Excellence

Section 1 assesses the scientific or technical quality and ambition of the project.

1.1 Objectives and Ambition

This section must address:

• The specific, measurable objectives of the project
• The state of the art — what is currently known, and what gap this project fills
• The ambition — why this project goes beyond incremental improvement
• The project concept — what is the core idea and why is it sound?

Common failure: Stating objectives that describe activities or outputs rather than the changes the project will produce. Objectives in Horizon proposals should describe what the project will achieve — new knowledge, a demonstrated technology, a deployed solution — not what it will do.

What evaluators assess:

• Are objectives clearly defined and measurable?
• Is the gap in knowledge or practice clearly identified?
• Is the proposed approach genuinely novel or does it duplicate existing work?
• Is there awareness of the state of the art?

1.2 Methodology

This is the most critical section for NGOs entering research or innovation consortia.

The methodology must:

• Describe the research or innovation approach in sufficient technical detail
• Justify the choice of methods over alternatives
• Identify critical risks to the methodology and propose mitigation measures
• Address the interdisciplinary dimensions where relevant

For proposals involving environmental NGOs as implementation partners, the methodology must explain:

• How practitioner knowledge contributes to the research design
• How field implementation will be conducted and evaluated
• What validation or testing approach will be used

The Theory of Change Requirement

All Horizon Europe Section 1 submissions must include a theory of change — explicitly named in the evaluation criteria. This must show:

• The pathway from research/innovation activities to societal or environmental outcomes
• The assumptions required for each step in the pathway to hold
• How the project's contribution connects to broader EU policy objectives

This is not an optional narrative element. It is an evaluation criterion.

1.3 Gender Equality and Intersectionality

Where relevant to the research content, gender dimensions must be addressed. Evaluators assess:

• Is the research question gender-neutral or does it have gender-specific dimensions?
• Has the project addressed how gender differences may affect results?
• Is gender balance reflected in the team composition?

This is not a box-ticking exercise. For environmental and community-focused projects, gender dimensions are frequently highly relevant — women often bear disproportionate exposure to environmental hazards and may respond differently to conservation interventions.

Section 2: Impact

Section 2 is where proposals most commonly underperform. It requires more than describing what the project hopes to achieve.

2.1 Expected Outcomes and Impacts

This section must distinguish between:

• Outputs: What the project directly produces (publications, datasets, prototypes, trained practitioners)
• Outcomes: Changes that occur as a result of outputs (practitioners changing practice, policy adoption, new products entering the market)
• Impacts: Broader changes at societal, economic, or environmental level over the medium to long term

The most common failure in Section 2: Describing outputs as impacts. Stating "the project will produce a dataset of soil health indicators" as an impact, when it is an output. The impact would be something like "land managers use soil health data to adjust practices, contributing to improved soil condition."

Evaluators score this section on:

• Specificity and measurability of expected outcomes
• Plausibility of the pathway from outputs to impacts
• Scale and significance of expected impacts relative to EU priorities
• Clarity about what changes in the world because of this project

2.2 Measures to Maximise Impact

This section addresses three elements:

Dissemination and Communication

Dissemination means making results accessible to the scientific community and other relevant audiences. Communication means engaging non-specialist audiences.

Plans must be specific — naming target audiences, channels, and formats. Generic statements ("we will publish papers and hold conferences") are insufficient.

Exploitation

Exploitation means how results will be taken up, used, and built upon beyond the project. For NGOs, this typically means:

• How findings will be incorporated into practice
• How tools or approaches developed will be maintained and scaled
• How partner organisations will adopt and continue using project outputs

Open Science

Horizon Europe has mandatory Open Science requirements:

• Open access to publications: All peer-reviewed publications must be made openly accessible (gold or green open access)
• Open research data: Research data must be made openly available unless there are legitimate reasons not to (legal, ethical, commercial)
• FAIR principles: All data must be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable

Data Management Plan (DMP)

A DMP is required for all Horizon Europe projects. At proposal stage, a brief version is sufficient. It must address:

• What data will be generated, collected, or used
• What data standards and metadata formats will be applied
• How data will be stored and protected
• How data will be shared and made available
• What data will be preserved long-term
• Costs associated with data management

2.3 EU Policy Alignment

Horizon Europe Section 2 requires explicit connection to EU policy priorities. For environmental projects, relevant frameworks include:

• European Green Deal
• EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030
• EU Farm to Fork Strategy
• EU Climate Law and Climate Adaptation Strategy
• Zero Pollution Action Plan
• EU Forest Strategy

Proposals must articulate not just that they are relevant to these frameworks, but how specific project outcomes contribute to defined policy targets.

Section 3: Implementation

3.1 Work Plan, Deliverables, and Milestones

The work plan is presented as work packages (WPs), each covering a thematic or functional area of the project.

Standard work package structure:

• WP1: Project Management — coordination, financial management, reporting
• WP2–WPn: Substantive work packages — organised by project phase, theme, or research question
• Communication and Dissemination WP — sometimes combined, sometimes separate
• Ethics WP — required if ethical issues are identified

For each work package:

• Objectives: What the WP aims to achieve
• Tasks: Specific activities within the WP
• Deliverables: Concrete outputs with defined format, due date, and responsible partner
• Milestones: Decision points or completion of key phases

Evaluators look for:

• Logical sequencing of activities across WPs
• Clear dependencies (when WP2 output is needed before WP3 can start)
• Realistic timeline given the scope
• Clear allocation of responsibilities

3.2 Consortium Structure

All standard RIA and IA proposals require a consortium of at least three independent organisations from at least three different EU member states or associated countries.

Each partner must be:

• Specifically identified (not "TBD")
• Assigned to specific WP tasks
• Contributing a clearly defined role and expertise
• Financially viable (demonstrated through capacity statements)

For NGOs in environmental projects, common partnership configurations include:

• Research institutions providing scientific methods and data analysis
• NGOs providing field implementation, stakeholder engagement, and local knowledge
• Public authorities or agencies providing regulatory context and data access
• Technology providers supplying monitoring tools or digital infrastructure

3.3 Resource Requirements and Budget

Horizon Europe budgets are presented per partner and per work package.

Eligible cost categories:

• Personnel costs (staff salaries, including researchers, project managers, M&E staff)
• Subcontracting costs (for external expertise)
• Travel and subsistence
• Equipment (depreciation of purchased equipment)
• Other direct costs (consumables, surveys, workshops)
• Indirect costs (overheads, calculated as a flat rate of 25% of direct costs)

Key budget principles:

• All costs must be actual, economical, and necessary
• Personnel costs must be based on actual salary rates
• Equipment must be depreciated over the useful lifetime if not purchased exclusively for the project
• Overheads are automatically calculated — you cannot claim more

Common budget errors:

• Including ineligible costs (contingency reserves, donations, penalties)
• Personnel costs not matching the hours allocated in the work plan
• Insufficient budget for open access publication charges (APCs)
• Missing budget for data management activities

Ethics Assessment in Horizon Europe Proposals

All Horizon Europe proposals include a mandatory ethics self-assessment. This is reviewed and may trigger an ethics review before the grant agreement is signed.

Ethics issues commonly relevant to environmental NGOs:

• Collection of personal data from communities or households (GDPR compliance)
• Research involving human participants (consent procedures)
• Work in protected areas or with endangered species (permits and protocols)
• Dual-use potential of research results
• Use of genetic resources (Nagoya Protocol compliance)

Proposals must not simply dismiss ethics issues. They must identify them and describe the measures in place to address them.

How Horizon Europe Differs from LIFE

NGOs familiar with LIFE programme proposals will find Horizon Europe significantly different:

Key Steps to a Competitive Horizon Europe Proposal

1. Read the work programme topic carefully — funding topics have specific requirements, target outcomes, and expected consortium types. Proposals that do not match the topic precisely are rejected on eligibility grounds.

2. Build a genuine consortium — partners should bring complementary expertise, not just organisational weight. Each partner's role must be clearly necessary and defined.

3. Invest in Section 1 (Excellence) — Horizon proposals are won or lost on the quality of the research concept and methodology. This requires the most rigorous intellectual preparation.

4. Use the theory of change — make the causal pathway from research activities to societal impact explicit and testable.

5. Design measurable outcomes — Section 2 (Impact) must include specific, measurable outcomes. Use indicator logic from the logframe.

6. Comply with all mandatory elements — DMP, Open Science, ethics, gender equality. Missing any of these creates a compliance failure that can prevent funding.

7. Budget carefully — Horizon budgets are subject to detailed financial verification. Inaccurate or unjustified costs create problems during implementation.

Build a Horizon Europe proposal that is technically rigorous, structurally coherent, and demonstrates a clear, plausible pathway from research activities to EU-level impact.

Related pages: EU project proposal template · Grant writing template · NGO grant proposal · LIFE programme EU · Theory of change for NGOs

Horizon Europe for Environmental NGOs: Practical Entry Points

Most environmental NGOs are not research institutions and have not historically engaged with Horizon Europe. The programme's complexity and the consortium requirement create barriers that feel prohibitive.

In practice, there are several practical entry points for environmental NGOs:

As a Consortium Partner

The most accessible route. Many Horizon projects — particularly in Cluster 6 (Environment) and the Missions — need partners with:

• Field implementation experience
• Community engagement and stakeholder facilitation capacity
• Local or regional ecological knowledge
• Practice-based evidence from conservation or restoration projects
• Dissemination reach to practitioner networks

An NGO in this role is responsible for specific work packages related to its expertise. Budget allocation reflects actual costs. The coordination burden lies with the lead partner.

To find consortium opportunities, monitor:

• CORDIS (cordis.europa.eu) for projects seeking partners
• Enterprise Europe Network (EEN) for consortium building support
• Call-specific partnering events hosted by the European Commission
• Your national NCP, which often maintains lists of consortium-seeking projects

As a Coordinator of a CSA (Coordination and Support Action)

For NGOs with strong policy engagement and stakeholder networks, a CSA may be appropriate. CSAs focus on coordination, communication, and support activities — not primary research. They are less technically demanding than RIAs but require strong project management and dissemination capacity.

Examples of CSA scope relevant to environmental NGOs:

• Building a practitioner network around a specific conservation approach
• Coordinating multi-country monitoring of a shared ecosystem
• Developing a community of practice on nature-based solutions

Through the Missions

The five EU Missions (Climate Adaptation, Soil Health, Ocean, Smart Cities, Cancer) have their own calls and often engage a broader range of organisations. The Mission on Soil Health and Food, for example, explicitly targets farmers, land managers, and environmental organisations.

Writing the Horizon Europe Theory of Change

The Horizon Europe evaluation criteria explicitly require a theory of change in Section 1 (Excellence). This must connect research or innovation activities to societal, economic, or environmental outcomes.

For environmental NGOs, the theory of change in a Horizon proposal typically follows this structure:

Activities: Research activities (surveys, experiments, modelling) + field demonstration and co-creation with practitioners

Outputs: New knowledge (datasets, publications, methods) + tested tools or approaches

Outcomes: Practitioners use new knowledge or tools to change management practice; policy processes incorporate research findings; new methodologies are adopted by the sector

Impact: Measurable change in environmental condition at scale; contribution to EU Green Deal or biodiversity targets

Key mechanism: Knowledge is not just produced — it is co-produced with end users, ensuring relevance; dissemination channels reach decision-makers and practitioners simultaneously.

This theory of change works because it explains not just that research produces knowledge, but why and how that knowledge translates into changed practice and environmental outcomes.

Frequently Asked Questions: Horizon Europe

How competitive is Horizon Europe?

Highly competitive. Success rates vary by call but are typically 10–20% for RIA and IA calls. The investment in preparation must be proportionate to the budget size.

How long does it take to prepare a Horizon Europe proposal?

A competitive consortium proposal typically requires 3–6 months of serious preparation, including consortium building, concept development, and iterative drafting. Starting at the call opening is too late for most organisations.

What is the typical project duration?

Most Horizon Europe projects run 36–60 months. Shorter projects are unusual given the scale of work required.

Can a UK organisation participate in Horizon Europe?

The UK is associated with Horizon Europe following a separate agreement. UK organisations can participate as consortium partners and receive funding subject to the terms of the association agreement. Check current status on the UK government's research funding pages.

How are overheads calculated?

Horizon Europe uses a flat 25% rate on direct costs (excluding subcontracting) for indirect costs. This is automatically calculated — you cannot claim more or less.