RAMP Joint Transnational Call 2026: Around €40 Million From 39 Funders Across 27 Countries for Raw Materials Research, With Pre-Proposals Closing 22 September 2026

RAMP Joint Transnational Call 2026: Around €40 Million From 39 Funders Across 27 Countries for Raw Materials Research, With Pre-Proposals Closing 22 September 2026

The Raw Materials Partnership is the co-funded European Partnership that pools national and regional research budgets behind one question: how Europe and its partners secure, use and re-use the materials that everything else depends on. RAMP launched its first Joint Transnational Call on 23 June 2026. Thirty-nine funders from twenty-seven countries have committed national and regional money totalling close to €40 million, and the pre-proposal deadline is 15:00 CEST on 22 September 2026.

If you have worked with a co-funded partnership before — CETPartnership, Driving Urban Transitions, Water4All — the machinery will be familiar. If you have not, the single most important structural fact is this: there is no central pot. Each participating funder commits its own budget, applies its own national eligibility rules, and pays its own beneficiaries directly. RAMP supplies a common call text, a common submission system, one central evaluation, and one ranking list. A proposal can score well on science and still collapse because a partner asked the wrong agency for costs that agency does not fund. Treat the national layer as half the proposal, not as paperwork you do at the end.

Key Details

Note the call text was updated on 31 July 2026. If you downloaded documents in early July, download them again — templates and national annexes in partnership calls change during the open period, and the national annexes are where the conditions that decide your budget live.

The Six Topics, and What Each One Is Really Asking For

RAMP has organised the call into six thematic areas. They run roughly in sequence along the value chain, from getting material out of the ground to understanding what happens to it afterwards.

1. Ensuring a resilient supply of raw materials from primary sources. Sustainable exploration, extraction, refining and processing. This is the topic for geoscience, mineral processing, hydrometallurgy and mine-site environmental performance. Reviewers on this topic have seen a great many incremental improvements to flotation and leaching; what earns attention is a route that changes the economics or the environmental burden of a specific ore body or feedstock rather than improving a unit operation by a few percent in the abstract.

2. Targeting secondary sources to enhance access to raw materials. Recovery from waste streams, landfills and urban mining. The recurring weakness in this space is feedstock realism. A recovery process validated on synthetic material with a clean composition is a laboratory result, not a secondary supply route. If you can name the actual waste stream, its variability, its current disposal cost and who owns it, you are already ahead of much of the field.

3. Efficient and effective use of raw materials in design and production. Resource-efficient processes and substitution — using less of a constrained material, or using a different one. Substitution proposals need to confront performance loss honestly. Reviewers know that replacing a critical element usually costs something; a proposal that claims otherwise reads as either naive or as not having tested the hard case.

4. Overcoming technological barriers to circularity. Reuse, repair, refurbishment and reverse logistics. This is where design-for-disassembly, non-destructive assessment of used components, and the practicalities of getting products back all sit.

5. Putting circular economy ambitions into action. Explicitly the non-technological side: barriers, business models and policy frameworks. This topic is a genuine opening for social scientists, economists and management researchers, and it is often under-subscribed relative to the technical topics in comparable partnership calls. If your work is on why circular business models fail commercially rather than on whether they are technically possible, this is the topic to read closely.

6. Innovative approaches for analysing raw materials value chains. Data management, modelling and traceability tools. Digital product passports, material flow analysis, supply-chain risk modelling and provenance verification belong here.

Alongside whichever topic you choose, the call asks every proposal to engage with crosscutting considerations: gender balance and diversity, social acceptance, the Safe and Sustainable by Design principle, and open science practices. These are not decoration. Social acceptance in particular is a live issue for anything touching extraction, and a proposal that treats community opposition as a communication problem to be solved by outreach will read poorly to reviewers who have watched real projects stall.

Who Can Apply

The consortium requirement is the first gate. You need at least three independent legal entities — one coordinator plus at least two other beneficiary partners — each requesting funding from a different participating country. At least two of the beneficiaries must come from EU Member States or Horizon Europe Associated Countries.

Eligible organisation types are broad: universities and other higher education institutions, public and private research organisations, companies of any size, consultancies, and other bodies including municipalities, NGOs, foundations and stakeholder associations. That breadth is deliberate. RAMP wants projects that connect research to the people who will operate, regulate or live with the result.

The participating countries span well beyond the EU: Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Brazil, Canada (Québec), Croatia, Czechia, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Moldova, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and Türkiye. Brazil, Canada, Israel, South Africa and Türkiye participating alongside the EU core is a meaningful signal about where raw materials expertise and deposits actually sit.

Second gate, and the one that breaks consortia: every partner must independently satisfy its own funder’s rules. National conditions differ sharply. Vinnova caps its grant at €500,000 per Swedish participant per project. TÜBİTAK’s national annex sets ceilings of €100,000 for Turkish higher education and public bodies and €180,000 for private organisations, with a maximum project duration of 36 months for its beneficiaries. The Research Council of Finland has committed €1.5 million in total to the call. Some funders will not fund companies at all; others will fund them only at a reduced rate; others require an industrial partner. There is no way to work this out from the central call text alone.

How the Two-Stage Process Works

Stage 1, pre-proposal. Submitted through RAMP ESES by 15:00 CEST on 22 September 2026. The pre-proposal is checked for eligibility and then evaluated by an expert panel. Selection for stage 2 rests on the evaluation outcome and on the budget available from the funders your partners have approached. Results arrive in mid-December 2026.

Stage 2, full proposal. Only invited consortia may submit, by 15:00 CET on 15 February 2027. Full proposals go through eligibility checks, central evaluation and an ethics review. Results in mid-May 2027, funding decisions between June and September 2027, and projects starting from mid-2027.

That is roughly a year from pre-proposal deadline to project start. Plan for it. Do not build a consortium around a partner whose only researcher on the topic has a contract ending in 2027, and do not promise a company an outcome it needs before 2028.

The templates matter more than they look. RAMP provides a Pre-proposal Technical Description Template and a Pre-proposal CV Template, both on the call page. Panels evaluating short pre-proposals read many documents in a compressed period; a proposal that fights the template — running long, restructuring sections, cramming figures — costs the reader time and gains nothing.

Required Materials and Preparation Strategy

For stage 1 you need the completed technical description in the provided template, CVs in the provided CV template, and the administrative and budget data entered directly into ESES. Register in ESES early. Submission systems for partnership calls are reliably slow in the final hours before a 15:00 deadline, and a 15:00 deadline means the last-minute window is the middle of a working day across several time zones, not the small hours.

Before writing anything, do three things.

Talk to your National Contact Point. Every participating funder has one, listed via the RAMP partnership members pages. A fifteen-minute call establishes whether your cost model is fundable, whether your organisation type qualifies, and whether the funder has topic preferences. That call has saved more proposals than any amount of polishing.

Fix the budget shape before the science. Work out what each partner can actually receive under its own funder’s rules, then design work packages that fit. Consortia that design an elegant technical plan first and discover in September that the partner meant to do the pilot work cannot be paid for capital costs end up with a hollowed-out project.

Name the material and the decision. The strongest raw materials proposals are specific about which material, which stream, which process step, and which decision the result changes. “Improving circularity in electronics” is not a project. “Recovering neodymium from a named category of end-of-life drive units currently going to shredder, at a recovery rate and cost that a named operator would adopt” is.

If you are missing a partner, RAMP runs a partnering platform at https://submission-ramp.ptj.de/partnering. Use it early — a partner recruited in the last fortnight rarely contributes enough to the pre-proposal to be convincing, and reviewers can usually tell.

Common Mistakes

Treating the national annexes as an afterthought. This is the dominant failure mode in partnership calls. Read them in week one.

Building a consortium of three that is really a project of one. Meeting the minimum with two partners who contribute a letter of support and a token task is transparent. Every partner should have a reason to be there that the others cannot supply.

Ignoring the crosscutting considerations. Gender and diversity, social acceptance, Safe and Sustainable by Design and open science are named in the call. A proposal that mentions none of them has visibly not read the call text.

Proposing basic research to an innovation partnership. RAMP expects proposals that add value, innovate and contribute to industrial development. Excellent science with no line of sight to use is a mismatch here, however good it is.

Missing the updated documents. The call text was revised on 31 July 2026. Working from a June download is an avoidable risk.

Underestimating the ethics review. It sits in stage 2 and applies to work involving human participants, personal data, environmental impact and non-EU field sites. Flag issues honestly at stage 2 rather than hoping they pass unnoticed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I apply as an individual researcher? No. This is a consortium call with a minimum of three partners from three participating countries.

Can my country participate if it is not on the list? Partners from non-participating countries can generally join a consortium only if they bring their own funding, and they do not count towards the three-country minimum. Confirm the specifics with the Call Secretariat.

How much can my organisation receive? That depends entirely on which funder pays you. There is no single central figure. Check your national annex — the published ceilings range from tens of thousands to €500,000 per participant.

What is the maximum project duration? The central call page does not state one; duration limits are set nationally. TÜBİTAK, for example, caps its beneficiaries at 36 months. Confirm with your own funder before planning a work schedule.

Do I have to submit a national application too? In several countries, yes. TÜBİTAK required a separate national submission through its own system a few days after the international deadline. Check whether your funder has a parallel national step and what its own deadline is.

Is there a second call? RAMP is a multi-year partnership and further calls are expected, but nothing beyond JTC 2026 is confirmed on the call page. If this cycle does not fit, join the RAMP newsletter to catch the next one.

Who do I contact with questions? The Call Secretariat is [email protected] for call-wide questions. For anything about money, eligibility or cost rules, your National Contact Point is the correct and faster route.

Official Links and Next Steps

• Call page, with the call text updated 31 July 2026 and both pre-proposal templates: https://ramprawmaterials.eu/call/ramp-joint-call-2026
• Submission system (RAMP ESES): https://submission-ramp.ptj.de/call2026/
• Partnering platform: https://submission-ramp.ptj.de/partnering
• Call Secretariat: [email protected]

With the pre-proposal deadline on 22 September 2026, the practical sequence from early August is: download the current call text and your national annex this week; contact your National Contact Point within days; confirm the third partner and their funder’s rules by the end of August; and spend September writing to the template rather than negotiating consortium membership. The projects that get funded in 2027 are, almost without exception, the ones whose consortium was settled before the writing started.