PERCEIVE is more than a research project: it aims at generating a process of co-creation together with Cohesion Policy's practitioners. In 2018 we will organise a cycle of workshops with Local Managing Authorities in order to receive feedback on the research and meet the needs of their work.

When the research meets the practice

How can a research project be useful to professionals? One of PERCEIVE’s objectives is to foster interaction between researchers and practitioners (Local Managing Authorities and policy-makers) in order to create an informed community that share skills, approaches, information and data. In this way, the research will shape itself in order to meet needs and analyse the criticalities that professionals encounter during their work, thus generating a process of co-creation.

To this purpose, we will organise a cycle of workshops from April to September 2018 - one for each case-study region - that will involve: practitioners already involved in the PERCEIVE's focus groups; regional policy-makers and regional stakeholders; and members of our Advisory Board.

What will be discussed and how?

The workshops aim at understanding what are the obstacles to the work of LMAs, by using a participatory approach to develop new insights and good practices. The teams will present research results and their possible implications for the practitioners’ work. The workshops will be divided into three plus one thematic sections:

1. the governance of Cohesion Policy;
2. the analysis of the results of the PERCEIVE survey;
3. the analysis of the communication strategies;
4. co-creation of the policy recommendations.

The first three sections will see the researchers showing the results of the research and the practitioners providing feedbacks and comments. Such as:

• Do you think that this analysis is representative of your region?
• Did you expect this kind of results? 
• What could be done to improve the knowledge about the EU?
• Would you change something in your communication strategy and channels?
• Do you think you are using the online communication tools differently?
• Are your language and channels tailored to specific targets?

In the last section, the practitioners and the researchers will work together to identify good practices and policy recommendations, which should be able to enhance the LMAs’ governance system and to use the research output in the decision-making points. The bases for policy recommendations will be guided by questions such as:

• What are the major criticalities in the region? How could they be solved?
• What are the good and best practices of the region that could be shared and used in other regions
• Would you change the way you relate to other regions, the state and the European Commission?

On the output side, these workshops will feed two important policy briefs: the first one will present guidelines on cohesion policies implementation and the second on cohesion policies communication.

The first workshop was held this week in Olsztyn, Poland, and the second one is going to be in the to be next week in Bologna, Italy. 

Are you interested in future updates on our workshops? Go to the dedicated page here.

Are you a Local Managing Authority? Visit the page we created for you here.

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