TeRRItoria at PROCEEDS 1ST ESR training school
During 18th – 20th February, the PROCEEDS 1st ESR training school was organized by South East European Research Centre (SEERC) in Thessaloniki, Greece. PROCEEDS is a research project funded by the EU’s Marie Skłodowska-Curie Research and Innovation Staff Exchange and supports the implementation of the European Commission’s Circular Economy strategy in the field of Supply Chain Management. Its first 3-day training school/workshop referred to Research Methods for Circular Economy Research in Agrifood, and addressed early stage researchers, PhD candidates and MSc students.
Within the context of this training event, TeRRItoria was presented by Dr George Eleftherakis (SEERC). Dr Eleftherakis delivered a presentation describing the aims of TeRRItoria and the rationale for integrating RRI principles into territorial Smart Specialization Strategies (S3). It was argued that such an integration can lead to more anticipatory, reflective, inclusive and responsive Smart Specialization Strategies, while it can also introduce new indicators – based on RRI principles – as complementary to current efforts to monitor and evaluate S3 implementation.
Reference was made to the project’s Transformative Experiments, and the experiment of the Region of Central Macedonia (RCM) and the regional Gender Equality Plan to be developed were analysed in more detail. It was specified that the RCM experiment will address the low representation of women in STEM specialisations and at the upper management levels of R&I in both academia and industry, while a particular focus will concurrently be placed on the ICT domain. Dr Eleftherakis finally argued that the experiment’s main impact refers to: ensuring gender equality not just in numbers, promoting institutional/transformational changes in the participating actors and in their territorial ecosystems, ensuring transferability of best practices (regional and EU level), and contributing to the achievement of the ERA objectives for gender equality and gender mainstreaming.
