CoreGroup Meeting in Berlin

The INSPIRATION Core Group – which is basically the management board of the consortium consisting of the Work Package and Theme Leaders – met in Berlin in mid-March to take stake of the current project progress and to plan next steps.

The participants revisited the result of the data collection activities and appreciated the efforts of the project partners in Working Package 2. This WP marked the bottom-up collation of information in more than 17 European countries on research demands on soil, land-use and land management as well as on science-policy-interface and funding options in the last year. In total, National Focal Points (NFPs) engaged with circa 500 stakeholders deriving from the research funding and industry/business communities (including SMEs), the scientific, consultancy, policy-making, management arena as well as NGOs to collate research demands from these key stakeholders in the different European Member States. The results were reported in the Deliverable D2.5 “National reports with a review and synthesis of the collated information”, which can be downloaded from our website.

Next to discussing general management and dissemination issues, the Core Group focused its meeting on the fine-tuning of the next activities in the follow-up WP3. Here the nearly 1000-page D2.5-report will be assessed and synthesized in order to identify trans-national and trans-sectoral research issues to be the basis of a future Strategic Research Agenda (SRA). The Core Group agreed on a course of action that takes up a multi-method approach to the analysis of the collated data. In particular, reference to common themes identified in the conceptual model of INSPIRATION will be used. By revisiting the WP3 approach and D2.5 content in a workshop together with the NFPs in April, by engaging with national key stakeholders in at least two dedicated workshops in June and autumn 2016 and by liaising with the International Advisory Board (IAB) throughout the tasks, it shall be ensured that the bottom-up approach of INSPIRATION is further enshrined in the project works in order to safeguard representation of stakeholder key needs and relevance of research topics to be identified for the SRA to meet the societal challenges in Europe.

The Berlin meeting also finalized the organization of the up-coming annual meeting at the University of Algarve in Faro, Portugal in June 2016. Here, next to the consortium partners from 17 countries, more than 60 key stakeholders and the IAB will join.