‘Vulnerability’ is increasingly used as a conceptual tool to guide the design and implementation of the global protection regime, as illustrated by the 2016 New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants and the subsequent adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration and of the final draft of the Global Compact on Refugees. However, ‘vulnerability’ lacks a sharp conceptualisation and still needs to be accompanied by a thorough understanding of its concrete meanings, practical consequences and legal implications. This research project aims to address these uncertainties from a critical and comparative perspective, with a focus on forced migration. It will provide a comprehensive analysis of how the ‘protection regimes’ of select countries address the vulnerabilities of ‘protection seekers’. The select countries are in Europe (Belgium, Germany, Italy, Norway), North America (Canada), the Middle East (Lebanon) and Africa (Uganda and South Africa). The analysis adopts two different yet complementary perspectives. First, the way the ‘vulnerabilities’ of the protection seekers are being assessed and addressed by the relevant norms and in the practices of the decision makers will be systematically documented and analysed through a combination of legal and empirical data. Second, the various forms and nature of the concrete experiences of ‘vulnerability’ as they are lived by the protection seekers, including the resilience strategies and how they are being continuously shaped in interactions with the legal frameworks, will be documented and analysed through empirical data collected during fieldwork research. Ultimately, the very notion of ‘vulnerability’ will be questioned and assessed from a critical perspective. An alternative concept, such as ‘precarity’, may be suggested to better reflect the concrete experiences of the protection seekers.

<< Objectives >>This project aims to equip European employees and volunteers of civil society organisations (CSOs) in their operational, strategic and prospective reflections, and in their partnership dialogue, by strengthening the knowledge of their specificities and the recognition of their contribution to European society and democracy, in order to make CSOs a powerful lever of development of participation, democratic engagement and active citizenship of all Europeans.<< Implementation >>We will organise a seminar bringing together CSO practitioners, their partners, training organisations that work with CSOs and researchers, in order to qualify the knowledge needs of CSOs and to identify ways to practically meet these needs. The results of this seminar will be disseminated throughout Europe via a white paper and a conference. A collaborative digital library will also be created to disseminate useful resources for the development of CSOs and training of practitioners.<< Results >>Our project will allow to train CSO practitioners and to increase their awareness of the importance of equipping their reflections and their action with a better knowledge of the specificities and contributions of CSOs to the European society. It will also result in a knowledge network of practitioners and researchers on CSOs. Finally, it will provide training organisations and researchers that work with/on CSOs with pratical recommendations on CSO's needs.

Social economy organisations play a crucial role in tackling social exclusion. However, the development of social economy governance frameworks and their impact on social inclusion remains insufficiently explored. The DICES project aims to bridge this gap with a threefold objective: (i) Enhance understanding of Europe's social economy and identify factors driving its uneven development; (ii) Evaluate the role of social economy organisations in addressing social exclusion and improving services and workplaces; (iii) Recommend policy measures and governance frameworks to unlock the social economy's potential, including strategies for identifying and promoting best practices. DICES, first, establishes a conceptual and empirical framework and conducts a mapping, examining the social economy's integration into welfare governance frameworks. Second, DICES uses 'deep dives' to investigate contributions at local, including in left behind places, and organisational levels, including in the provision of care. This work builds on case studies and pilot actions, a survey, small-scale experiments and other innovative methods. This approach is connected through the identification of conditions that would allow organisational experiments to scale up into institutional experiments. DICES uses interdisciplinary methods across EU and non-EU countries. The project engages stakeholders through co-design of pilot actions and peer review cycles, complementing quantitative and qualitative studies. Stakeholder input helps develop concrete policy proposals. DICES disseminates findings through research papers policy briefs, a digital storyboard, webinars, and toolboxes for policymakers and practitioners to maximise impact on policymakers, stakeholders, and the public.

BRIDGES aims to understand the causes and consequences of migration narratives in a context of increasing politicisation and polarisation. By focusing on six current/former EU countries (FR, GE, HU, IT, SP, and UK), it has a three-fold objective. First, at the academic level, it aims to understand the processes of narrative production and impact and their mutual interaction. This entails analysing: a) why some narratives have become dominant over others in public and political debates from a historical perspective; b) how narratives shape individual attitudes in Europe and potential migrants’ decisions in countries of origin and transit; c) how narratives impact policy decisions and outputs both at the national and EU levels; and d) how individuals and policymakers become in turn narrative producers (‘shaped shapers’) and influence each other. Second, at the policy level, it aims to foster evidence-based policies. By developing a typology of government strategies for responding to populist narratives, we will provide policymakers with recommendations on how to redress a tendency towards increasingly symbolic policies in the field of migration and integration. Third, at the societal level, our objective is to create spaces for dialogue between actors involved in narrative production as well as to exchange innovative good practices among artistic communities, civil society organisations and migrant communities focused on how to build more inclusive accounts. The project objectives can only be achieved if we bridge – hence the name BRIDGES – several critical gaps between disciplines and between research and practice. A key added value of the project is its interdisciplinarity and co-production approaches, including three interactive workshops with policy, media and civil society actors, an itinerant photojournalism exhibition and two hip hop contests to reflect on the challenges of multicultural and increasingly diverse societies.