The Lorax project is a comparative effort to expand our understanding of global political architecture through the consideration of a potential set of ‘missing cases’, namely supranational policy fields organized around regional ecosystems. The project explores this question: Do regional politics around national border-crossing ecosystems share important resemblances and differ in significant ways from global politics? To address this question, the Lorax project analyzes the networks of actors, hierarchies between actors and diplomatic norms of the governance fields that have grown up around efforts to ‘speak for’ border-crossing ecosystems in three locations – the Arctic Ocean, the Amazon Basin, and the Caspian Sea. ‘Ecosystemic politics’ is meant to indicate regional-level political efforts justified by the shared management or discussion of collectively acknowledged ‘border-crossing’ ecosystems. Frequently, the political cooperation may be on issues that would be seen as environmental or regulatory politics relating to the ecosystem itself, but ecosystemic politics is not, by definition, limited to such questions of environmental politics. Rather, the word ‘ecosystemic’ gives the Lorax team a sense of where to look without presupposing the interests and issues that engaged actors may bring to those regional interactions. The project aims to generate new insights about the architecture and dynamics of global governance by rigorously researching and then comparing three cases of policy fields around national border-crossing ecosystems. The team will consist of the PI, a postdoc, a PhD and additional senior researcher capacity as needed. An ambitious, but achievable, publication plan (9 articles, 1 book) is mapped out to ensure rigorous finalization of results and dissemination to social science fields engaged with supranational governance questions.

Most policy fields in global governance have an abundance of country performance indicators (CPIs) and new CPIs proliferate apace. States are now measured and ranked on a dizzying array of cross-cutting metrics. Prima facie, the era of indicators promises a revolution: armed with ever improving data, policymakers can better allocate scarce resources to address global challenges. Yet, the era of indicators generates a problem and a paradox: while each individual CPI strives to simplify complexity, an abundance of CPIs on the same issue multiplies complexity and thus generates ambiguity. Moreover, while it would be reassuring if we could assume only the soundest CPIs would thrive, many high-profile CPIs remain in widespread use despite well-known shortcomings.Crucially, the paradox begets a major puzzle that prior research has yet to consider: How do private and public bodies navigate policy fields populated with multiple indicators, each portending to measure the same phenomenon? Although prior research provides firm grounds to hope that CPI users and producers improve their practices over time, no studies have investigated whether they do. Rendering this gap tractable, Navigator investigates the “marketplace of indicators” in four major policy fields: education, global governance, climate policy, and pandemic preparedness. Navigator’s novel framework—inspired by the classic liberal theory of the marketplace of ideas—enables the systemic, longitudinal analysis of how users’ and producers adapt their practices over time: Whether users learn in light of criticism of their favoured CPIs, how they discern when faced with a diversity of CPIs; and how producers compete for users within crowded policy fields. In this way, Navigator would push the frontier of CPI research by conducting a systematic problem shift: from investigating a single CPI’s influence or limitations, to examining how users and producers adapt in the face of growing CPI competition and CPI critique.

How should the EU navigate the increasingly complex - and conflict-laden - institutional spaces of global governance to advance a rules-based international order? And what factors should be emphasized when considering which institutions to strengthen, which to reform, and which to by-pass when revitalising multilateralism? NAVIGATOR’s main objective is to answer these questions and deliver a ready-to-use “search mechanism” and associated pathways of action that the EU and its member states can use as it seeks to strengthen a rules-based international order. To achieve this, NAVIGATOR comprises a strong, global and inter-disciplinary team of researchers who explores institutional variation on six policy issues – climate change, digitalisation, finance/tax, health, migration and security – to identify what institutional mixes that enables the EU to have optimal impact in a given policy issue. We explore variation in formality (formal to informal), accessibility (open to closed), and normativity (expressed purpose is technical to openly normative). Drawing on these data and complementing these with content analysis, social network analysis, semi-structured interviews and European and global surveys, NAVIGATOR develops a “search mechanism” that allows the EU and member states to compare strengths and weaknesses of existing multilateral organizations, determine which can be reformed and which are too costly to reform, identify and assess alternatives, and, on this basis, develop action strategies to reform multilateralism. NAVIGATOR will be very relevant to the work programme, as it will assess the effectiveness of multilateral institutions and arrangements; identify the optimal pathways of action of EU support to multilateral, minilateral, private and public-private initiatives to further global governance in a given policy domain, and provide recommendations for EU engagement strategies in the context of the war in Ukraine, threats of nationalism and anti-EU populism.

The challenges of international police reform assistance are formidable. Conventional top-down institutional reform has proven neither effective nor sustainable. Community-based policing (COP) holds promise, however evaluations have pointed to a lack of in-depth understanding of police-community relations in police reform assistance. This project will conduct integrated social and technical research on COP in post-conflict countries in S.E. Europe, Asia, Africa and Central America. New knowledge, reflection on lessons learnt and “best practices” will support both national police and EU/International police reform assistance. The project will lead to a better understanding of police-community relations, and innovation in information and communication technology (ICT) for enhancing these relations in post-conflict countries undergoing serious security reform. Linking social and technological research, the project will study social, cultural, human security, legal and ethical dimensions of COP to understand how citizens and police can develop sustainable relations with the use of ICTs. We will explore how technological innovation can support COP in crime reporting and prevention. The project will explore ICT solutions to facilitate, strengthen and accelerate positive COP efforts and police-citizen interactions where trust levels are weak. Solutions will depend on the context and identified needs of end-users: communities, local police, national and international police (EU/UN), and policymakers, and may include citizen reporting, information monitoring, mobile value transfer, or improved organizational systems. The project includes a Policing Experts Network whose role is to support research planning, and dissemination and exploitation of findings, grounding the research in police practice. This will ensure findings are communicated by engaged police practitioners, and directly applied in COP education and training curricula in Europe and case countries.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the EU has responded by re-engaging with its neighbours. This builds on the assumption that bringing them into the European family of liberal democracies will increase the resilience of the whole European community against external negative interference. Combining insights from a variety of academic fields, RE-ENGAGE will deliver innovative research and concrete advice on how the EU should adapt its foreign policy tools to the current context. Russia’s war against Ukraine has radically altered European security, not only causing extreme civilian suffering in Ukraine, but posing a direct threat to neighbouring countries fearful of the war spreading. Confronted by the direst security crisis in decades, EU policymakers are forced to fundamentally rethink their security policies. Europe has demonstrated unexpected unity and resolve, adopting a series of sanctions against Russia, and increasing national defence spending to better handle potential military threats. This has also led to a revival of EU enlargement process. While this will not improve EU resilience to military threats in the narrow sense, it may counter hybrid warfare, which is the more likely threat faced by the EU and most of its neighbours. The neighbourhood policy and the accession process require urgent adjustment to build strong, resilient neighbourhood states capable of countering external threats, particularly those posed by hybrid warfare. A systematic investigation of how this can be achieved in the current context without compromising the EU’s values and security is therefore needed. Since Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, there have been increasing calls from the EU for a more context-sensitive approach to its neighbours. RE-ENGAGE will assist the EU in determining how best to achieve this goal through an in-depth study of six cases – three in the Western Balkans and three in the Eastern Neighbourhood.