Work package CONNECT
While setting out to plan and establish operational links between research programmes carried out in the EU Member States and Associated States, many of us come to realize that we actually toed the line for a rather ambitious hurdle race.
Trans-national adjustment of research agendas can be a tricky matter, intertwined with domestic research politics, national interests as well as constraints of decision makers and particular agendas at various levels.
Be that as it may; for the moment it is important to acknowledge that obviously the success of any ERA-Net depends very much on engaging with these political processes, which tend to be volatile and not always easy to get a handle on. The ERA-NET “CIRCLE” is no exemption in this regard. After 2009 we hope to be able to tell our success stories about joint calls in the fields of climate impact and adaptation, coordinated among the owners of research programmes in a fair number of European countries. But given above-mentioned circumstances, is there a pragmatic approach for CIRCLE to achieve this common purpose?
Well, our resources will probably not allow us to follow-up on every conceivable cooperation throughout Europe. Whatever we intend to facilitate through the activities of CIRCLE: it needs to be matched against the probability of realization. It may be a waste of limited resources to try and bring together what does not really fit. We therefore aim to achieve our pretty complex objectives by following some simple operational principles.
We are currently investing into an inventory and assessment of the CIRCLE relevant landscape. We intend to identify ‘potential success stories’ in the sense that we concentrate on the real opportunities that have a high chance of eventually flying. The most promising cases are of course those, where thematic and political boundary conditions appear to be favourable. Furthermore, operational challenges need to be sufficiently resolvable to showcase, how far-reaching trans-national cooperation among national level programmes could materialize.
Our assessment will be summarized in an intermediate evaluation and synthesised in a “Mission Paper”. It will serve to specify our operational objectives for the operational project phase, when we try to make potential success stories real ones. During this intermediary step we will aim to establish a realistic operational platform for the progress of CIRCLE by defining “clusters of cooperation” as reference points for our further work.
These clusters could consist of anything ranging from only two countries willing to enter close trans-boundary cooperation, to the entire EU collaborating in a particular programme area or on a research topic. Our initial inventory will provide an excellent basis for a thorough appraisal of topical, regional and operational perspectives on opportunities for collaboration. We will add to this an assessment of “late breaking developments”. This is, we try to take into consideration qualitative information about current trends in the political and institutional environment of climate impact and adaptation research on the national level.
Such pieces of information will help to engage and manage developments in complex processes of priority setting in domestic research politics. They will also be pivotal to assess actual potentials for realization of collaboration between national entities. The working plan for our operational phase two remains to be defined after the ‘Mission Paper’ is out. However, it will essentially be about delivering on our promises and bring about joint action within the defined clusters of cooperation.