Workshop on the co-development of the Shared Strategic Research Agenda – December 2, 2022

On December 2nd, 2022 researchers involved the project held the first of five co-development workshops on the Shared Strategic Research Agenda (SRA). This was conducted in hybrid format in Tiranë, Albania at POLIS University by our partner – Nordregio, researchers and with the participation of 20 participants from all project partners.

The long-term joint strategic research agenda for the twinning organisations is one of the main activities and deliverables of the GreenFORCE project.

The SRA will highlight areas of shared GT expertise across the consortium partnership. The focus is on identifying areas of common research interests and future research needs in policy relevant Green Transition (GT) themes to ensure that research and project activities meet the needs of policymakers, stakeholders and citizens across the Western Balkans (WB). The document will provide the foundation on which partner organisations can develop future research projects and build research networks as a platform for sharing knowledge, expertise, and best practices on key GT policy themes. The research agenda will also be shared and presented to stakeholders and practitioners in the WB.  It will be aligned with the research activities and results of the project, and will have a special focus on monitoring and planning of sustainable transitions at sub-national territorial level in the WB.

The development of the SRA can be broken down into 5 potential stages and this workshop focused on Stage 1: WB Green Transition Policy and funding Mapping.

It tackled identifying shared GT challenges and key GT policy thematic focus areas across the WB through a cross-comparison of existing EU, WB cross-border, national and regional level GT policies. This stage also mapped suitable research funding opportunities related to GT research themes.

It concluded with some next steps for all partners to conduct a general policy overview/analysis based on policy mapping and internal evaluation and to list some possible funding option for the organisations and international research projects.

This workshop will be followed by the second SRA workshop, to be held in Skopje in January 2023 with a focus on identifying shared GT challenges and cross-compare GT policy focus areas.