How can we accelerate transformations towards more sustainable societies and transfer existing knowledge into action? Establishing society-based labs, where societal and scientific actors jointly experiment in real-world contexts, are one popular answer. The new GAIA special issue focuses on reflections and empirical insights regarding labs in the real world and builds bridges among the growing research community.
Two important output documents of the CIMULACT project - which built on an extensive multistakeholder consultation process - are now available for download :
* the CIMULACT Vision Catalogue, which includes the 179 visions created by 1088 citizens in 30 EU countries; and
* the 23 Citizen-Based Topics for Future EU Research that is a collection of the research topics developed based on the citizen visions through further multi-step stakeholder consultation.
If you need more information, do not hesitate towrite to us!
Aiming to contribute to addressing the call for a closer connection between EU-funded research and societal needs, the CIMULACT project embarked on an extensive participatory initiative, including citizens, experts, policy makers and other stakeholders from across Europe. Numerous face-to-face meetings and a large-scale online consultation were implemented in 30 European countries to develop directions for future research, which are based on citizens’ visions and aspirations for the future.
As part of the Routledge SCORAI Studies on Sustainable Consumption series, a new book was published in January 2018 by a group of SCORAI Europe researchers including GreenDependent research director Edina Vadovics.
In addition to being part of the team of editors, Edina Vadovics also co-authored a chapter with GreenDependent expert Simon Milton.
The Manifestor for Transformative Social lnnovation was created in the TRANSIT project in which GreenDependent expert Edina Vadovics was an advisory board member. We endorse the Manifesto as we very much agree with its objectives and what it says - please consider joining us!
The most recent CIMULACT newsletter has been published in which we provide information about our dissemination activities: how and where the project consortium is disseminating, on the one hand, the project methodology (multiactor consultation), and, on the other, the outcomes and results of the multistep consultation process.
The newsletter can be found and downloaded from the CIMULACT website along with other interesting project publications.
ENERGISE is an innovative pan-European research initiative to achieve a greater scientific understanding of the social and cultural influences on energy consumption. The ENERGISE newsletter - edited by GreenDependent - provides regular updates about progress and outcomes, events we have organized or attended - or upcoming opportunities for networking. As before, you will also find relevant news and publications from ENERGISE partners.
Edina Vadovics, the research director of GreenDependent Institute contributed a blog on Ecological Sustainability and the Urgency of Transformative Social Innovation to the website of the TRANSIT(Transformative Social Innovation Theory) project. The most important message of the blog is that social innovation only becomes transformative if it explicitly addresses both the ecological and social aspects of sustainability, and helps move towards a state that is within ecological limits in a just and equitable way. Edina takes the example of climate change and the carbon footprint to explain this in more detail and provides two inspiring examples, one from Hungary and one from India, of what transformative social innovation can look like.
Final brochures of the save@work project are available now. The brochures provide information about experiences and results of the project aiming at energy behaviour change of workplaces in nine European countries. The Hungarian brochure is available HERE (in Hungarian), the European version can be downloaded from HERE (in English).
GreenDependent research director Edina Vadovics participates in the TRANSIT (Transformative Social Innovation Theory) project as a member of the International Advisory Board (IAB). At the final TRANSIT conference, Learning for Change, organised in Rotterdam, together with other members of the IAB she presented in an innovative plenary section. Innovative, because provocative 10-minute presentations by the IAB were interspersed with world café style discussions involving all participants. The discussions centered around the thought-provoking questions about transformative social innovation posed at the end of each presentation.