Edinburgh and Glasgow city councils have opened talks over potential successors to the City Region Deal programme.
City Region Deals are packages of funding agreed between the Scottish Government, the UK Government and local partners to improve regional economies and stimulate economic growth.
Glasgow secured £1.2bn in funding in 2014 for projects such as improving transport and cutting unemployment, with Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire, Inverness and the Highlands, and Edinburgh and South East Scotland later receiving their own deals.
As reported by The Scotsman, both City of Edinburgh Council and Glasgow City Council have opened talks with Westminster and Holyrood about the potential for successor schemes.
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Paul Lawrence, chief executive of the former, said at a finance meeting: "The resources needed to address these generational challenges are very difficult to see coming purely from within.
"At Edinburgh we have begun, in very early days, to have some conversations with both governments about what a successor to the City Region Deal might look like. Glasgow are trying to do the same thing.
"And I do think a sort of three-way dialogue between the city-region, many of these are regional issues - particularly transport and so on - the UK government and the Scottish Government, is a good place to start on that wider agenda.
"But we are also very keen to look at fiscal mechanisms, which share risk between the public and private sector.”
A Scottish Government spokesperson said: “The £1.3bn Edinburgh City Region Deal, which concludes in 2033, is supporting programmes to drive economic opportunities and provide more than 21,000 jobs in Edinburgh, the Lothians, Fife and the Scottish Borders.
“The Scottish Government is in regular conversation with Regional Economic Partnerships on economic growth and empowerment, including Edinburgh and South East Scotland.”
A UK government spokesperson said: “The Scottish Secretary and his officials have held productive discussions with representatives in every region of Scotland about the opportunities for creating growth in their area, and these will continue as our plans develop."
