Horizon 2020 project ROBUST was approved with conditions by the European Commission in December 2016 as previously reported.
These conditions were subsequently successfully met with and both the Grant Agreement between the European Commission and the lead partner (Wageningen University) and the Consortium Agreement between all 24 project partners from 11 countries have now been signed. The project formally commenced as from 1 June 2017 and its first full partner meeting took place in the Netherlands a week later. PURPLE was represented at this meeting by both treasurer Paul Van der Sluys and Vincent O'Connell who has now been engaged by PURPLE to oversee its work on the project.
The meeting represented an opportunity for a project partners to spend time together and to learn more about their respective organisations, regions and the roles which they intend to play over the next 48 months of the project. Vincent shared details of early thoughts as to the PURPLE role in the project. In short – PURPLE will take the lead on a Work Package (WP) which is explicitly about policy recommendations and it will also have some input to all seven other Work Packages. The PURPLE role begins in month one of the project and continues throughout the four year during which its work will take place.
In large part the project is designed to take forward the work that was done under the OECD project RURBAN some for five years ago. As PURPLE was itself directly involved in that piece of work, it is uniquely well-placed both to take the work itself forward and to make a contribution to the ROBUST project from its earliest stages.
At the 26th PURPLE General Assembly held in Brussels on June 27 PURPLE member regions were able to hear more about the project, about PURPLE’s plans for its work on the project, and to begin to explore ways in which individual member regions might be directly involved. The event was also the opportunity to signal the launch of what is to be termed the ROBUST Project Hub. We anticipate that this will be an ongoing piece of work whereby we will aggregate existing information about policy as regards rural-urban linkages and begin to develop a series of reports and findings as the project develops.
By the project conclusion the intention is that the Hub (essentially an umbrella term for the work we will do) will have developed a number of thematic reports and will have contributed to other strands of work within the project and have arrived as a “manifesto” type of document with regards to future policy frameworks.
As has been reported previously the ROBUST project represents the first occasion upon which the PURPLE AISBL network has been directly involved in a funded EU project as a partner in its own right. It became very clear during the first meeting that PURPLE has an important cross-cutting role to play in the project and is well positioned to take forward a significant piece of work on behalf of both of the consortium partners and with its own member regions.
