14.11.2023 - 15.11.2023 | Tbilisi, Georgia

6th EU-Eastern Partnership/ Central Asia Policy Stakeholders' Conference

The policy dialogue in Tbilisi was the 6th and last in a series of similar conferences that took place between 2009 and 20012. The focus of the current event was on the EU-EaP/CA STI cooperation in addressing societal challenges: priorities, modalities and synergies of policies and instruments.

The Policy Stakeholders’ Conference (PSC) that took place in Tbilisi on 14-15 November 2012 was the last in a series of six similar forums for policy dialogue between stakeholders organised in the framework of the IncoNet EECA and IncoNet CA/SC FP7 projects betwenn 2009 and 2012. The focus of the current  event was on the EU-EaP/CA STI cooperation in addressing societal challenges: Priorities, modalities and synergies of policies and instruments.

Aiming at bridging past activities and future objectives to provide a measure of continuity and the basis for coherence between different EU and national policies and instruments, the PSC comprised two parts:

1. The PSC tried to focus on societal challenges important for the region and relevant for Horizon 2020 (i.e. climate change, energy and health), building on the results of a respective Workshop organised under the IncoNet EECA project in June 2012.
   In that respect, the main goal of the PSC was to present the state-of-the art and trends on the three selected societal challenges (climate change, energy and health) and to investigate how the EU MS and the Eastern Partnership (EaP) and Central Asian (CA) countries address them through their national (‘sectoral’) policies and what role Science, Technology and Innovation (STI) plays in this process.
2. It was anticipated to create synergies with other EU policies and instruments and in particular with ENPI/DCI, building on the results of the IncoNET EECA project on that field. Here, the goal of the PSC was to:
   
   
   • identify regional initiatives, common objectives and operational instruments (programmes) through which research addressing the three societal challenges is supported; 
   • present ENPI/DCI and good practice examples that will open perspectives for the exploitation of these instruments to support STI capacity building activities in the three societal challenges; and
   • define how the EU instruments identified can better support the policies targeting the three societal challenges.

Furthermore, the PSC aimed at contributing to the prioritisation and implementation of the Recommendations of the White Paper for the EU-EECA cooperation, a key deliverable of the IncoNet EECA project.

The PSC involved relevant actors and stakeholders active in the field of the three societal challenges health, energy and climate change, as well as those dealing with cooperation Instruments (ENPI, DCI, UNDP, etc.).

About 100 policy makers and representatives from 3 sectors from 11 countries (Eastern Partnership and Central Asia) and 6 EU MS and AC, representatives of the EU Delegation to Georgia, as well as international organisations (i.e. UNDP, WHO, UNESCO, ISTC, STCU, etc.) attended the conference to investigate ways to enhance the bi-regional cooperation and to optimise the use of support instruments in addressing societal challenges .

Programme

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Presentations

Download available from the website of the Georgian Research and Development Fountation

Conclusions

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