Project

ENGAGE – 'Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe’

13.01.2021

In January 2021, top-level researchers and experts from ten different countries have launched the EU-funded project ENGAGE – ‘Envisioning a New Governance Architecture for a Global Europe’ – under the umbrella of the European Commission’s prestigious Horizon 2020 research program.

ENGAGE brings together a consortium of nine universities and four think tanks, including Esade Business & Law School (Spain, coordinator), Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), Rijksuniversiteit Groningen (The Netherlands), Sabanci University (Turkey), The University of Edinburgh (United Kingdom), Carnegie Europe Foundation (Belgium), International Institute for Strategic Studies (Germany and UK), Institut de Relations Internationales et Stratégiques (France), College of Europe (Natolin) (Poland), Hertie School (Germany), GLOBSEC (Slovakia), Institut Barcelona d’Estudis Internacionals (Spain), and Tampere University (Finland).

ENGAGE, which will run over the course of three and a half years (2021-2024), will advance goals that are aligned with the European Commission’s push to have a stronger and more united European voice in the world. The project will focus on how the EU can effectively and sustainably harness all of its tools in a joined-up external action, with an eye to meeting key strategic challenges and becoming a stronger global actor.

More specifically, ENGAGE pursues the following five general objectives:

  • To analyse the main contextual challenges that the EU’s external action is facing, both those arising from the diversification of international relations and global governance and those originating from the acceptability of EU external action from the perspective of citizens and national decisionmakers.
  • To assess existing governance structures and policy processes, those that are foreseen in the Treaties but are yet to come to fruition (so-called “sleeping beauties”), and those that should be devised in relation to the multiple domains of the EU’s external action.
  • To examine the ways in which the EU can more effectively achieve a set of key goals, including a successful engagement with strategic partners, neighbouring regions, and conflict and crisis scenarios.
  • To formulate recommendations, presented via a white paper, on how to accommodate multiple action domains, including traditionally internal policy areas, in a joined-up, coherent, sustainable, and effective external action. Furthermore, ENGAGE will produce suggestions on how to coordinate EU Member States’ foreign policies on the basis of common EU positions.

Team

  • Kinga Brudzinska, Head of Future of Europe Programme
  • Vladislava Gubalova, Senior Research Fellow, Future of Europe Programme
  • Lucia Rybnikárová, Project Coordinator

Project page: https://www.engage-eu.eu/

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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 962533.