know-man
The aims and preliminary results as well as foreseen steps of the KNOW-MAN project have been presented by Agnieszka Olechnicka and Adam Ploszaj from EUROREG during the National ESPON Event in Warsaw, Poland. The conference: Evidence-based territorial development. What do ESPON, INTERREG IVC and URBACT results say about Poland? was organised by the Polish ECP in cooperation with the INTERREG IVC and URBAC national contact points and took place on 7th December 2010 in Warsaw at the University of Warsaw Library. The conference with the number of participants of 150 was held in Polish.
Scientists, researchers, social activists and policymakers are often functioning in different contexts, separated by knowledge frontiers and barriers of information flow. Decision makers need reliable evidence to construct the toolbox for shaping and implementing functional and territorial policies. Every public intervention affects social, economic and environmental reality. A way of incorporating scientific evidence in shaping public interventions is the so-called evidence-based policy. This approach is about supporting the policies with reliable, empirical data. Using this approach to include the territorial dimension in shaping and evaluating public policies one can speak of evidence-based territorial development. The areas of public intervention, that are in particular need of scientific evidence and knowledge base are i.e: environment, transport, energy, demography, sustainable development or knowledge-based economy and innovation.
Within the ESPON, INTERREG IVC and URBACT Programs one can find many projects focused on delivery of scientific evidence, delivery of good practices in transnational cooperation or delivery of tools and recommendations of managing regional and local development of different types of EU territories. In order to capitalize the collected knowledge base and find potential synergies between ESPON, INTERREG IVC and URBACT results the Polish ECP decided to organise a conference that would provide a synthetic insight into the activities that involve Polish institutions.
The conference was an opportunity to present the outcomes of these programs that are relevant for the Polish context and appropriate for different scales and different phases of planning process. In particular, the speakers concentrated on tools, recommendations and solutions that can be useful for different groups of stakeholders working in the field of planning (policymakers, practitioners, researchers, experts, social activists etc.). The review of various initiatives in which Polish institutions play an active role encouraged fruitful knowledge exchange as well as facilitated dialogue and networking between researchers and practitioners.
The program of the conference as well as presentations are available at:
Posts from the Regional Cooperation Portal www.regional-cooperation.eu