Agenda

On June 26th, within the framework of the Erasmus+ project ENGAGEgreen, the project team of Ca’ Foscari University of Venice organized the workshop “Build and enhance the academic approach to public engagement”. The roundtable gathered experiences of public engagement from one of the project partners University of Granada (Spain), as well as centers affiliated to Ca’ Foscari.

When describing the example of Impronta Granada, Esteban Romero Frías (University of Granada), affirms that “Our aim is to generate a narrative of collaboration between municipalities and the university”. Indeed, with its alliance established between the University of Granada and the Granada Provincial Council, Impronta Granada facilitates the knowledge transfer to and from academia and the territory, in order to best address the challenges of the province.

Similarly, Ca’ Foscari’s portal PInK (Promoting Innovation and Knowledge) works as a bridge between the needs of businesses and the competencies developed in the university. “PInK brings together pieces of research from different sectors to solve today’s challenges” say Samuela Franceschini & Luciana Gualdi in their introduction to the different projects supported by PInK.

Other relevant contributions to the workshop were from Giulio Minto from the Yunus Social Innovation Center (YSBC) which supports, under different perspectives, its partners to reach innovative and challenging solutions; and from the Governance and Social Innovation Centre (GSI), which intervenes in particular on the promotion and design of innovative applied research, technical assistance and/or consultancy actions addressed to public administrations, intermediary organizations and enterprises to support governance and social innovation processes.

One of the most relevant methodological issues, as Stefano Campostrini pointed out, seems to be the management of a complex activity, involving several skills and competences:

1. the networking activity
2. the project phase
3. the management of planned activities
4. the dissemination phase.

In conclusion, one of the main suggestions of the debate related to these presentations is that the aforementioned four activities should be interlinked, in a circular and virtuous ecosystem. Indeed, dissemination activities cannot be the end of the process, rather, they can be the starting point of new network activities, in a process that cannot be thought of as closed or finished. The ecosystem logic implies, among other things, the need for collaboration within universities between research on the one hand and administration on the other. This new form of collaboration cannot only be linked to participation in the presentation of a project, on the contrary, it must be part of the normal approach to research. If this direction is taken, a number of change actions appear necessary. On the one hand, the need for an administrative approach to value and distinguish different actions (advocacy, for example, is different from stakeholder involvement, as is project activity), on the other hand, the engagement of researchers remains problematic since public engagement activities are not considered by all academic research staff as regular activities.

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The in-person workshop was followed by an online session titled “Engaging Green Policy Decision Making” open to the public and project partners.