To further the development of the Shared Research Agenda (SRA) the second co-development workshop on Green Transition (GT) in the Western Balkans (WB) was held in Skopje, North Macedonia on January 23^rd, 2023 with 21 participants from all project partners.

The workshop’s goal was to narrow down the WB Green Agenda (GA) policy themes that would be included in the SRA. This was accomplished through two tasks:

1. Identification of the WB GA policy issues that are top priorities for each partner country by highlighting priority policy areas.
2. Focusing on internal expertise and interests, with the goal of mapping project partners’ research skills and interests onto WB GA policy areas.

In both cases, the participants were divided into country teams and WB GA sub-themes were prioritized based on their importance to their particular country policy focus areas. On the second round of discussion, Western Balkan partners indicated which WB GA themes they had capacity and/or interest in further developing.

Following this group activity, conversations were held concerning the results and a conversation about the task’s outcomes began, with the intention of answering the following questions:

• Which WB green agenda policy themes should the SRA address? Should we structure the SRA around main themes or the sub-themes? Should we split it down into sub-themes? Or choose another theme?
• Should the SRA just focus on WB GA policy themes that are shared by all partner countries and of which the partners are knowledgeable? Or should it cover as well topics in which partners lack expertise but wish to enhance research capacity?

In the end, a potential SRA structure was presented and a number of themes/sub-themes were identified to be carried out by each of the partners. To advance with the SRA’s content, assignments were allocated to all partner countries to compose a 1-2-page document for each theme/sub-theme assigned.

To read the full report on this workshop click here.