Periodic Reporting for period 1 - CLOE (training to Complexity: muLtidisciplinary approaches to rural and mOuntain sustainable devElopment and conservation for innovative Doctoral Programmes)
Berichtszeitraum: 2021-04-01 bis 2023-03-31
The depopulation and abandonment of rural areas, with their environmental and social consequences, are a priority on the agenda of national and European governments. The CoVid emergency highlighted risks associated with population concentration in urban centres and urges a rethink of settlement patterns in a more decentralised way and made more visible the differences in welfare services between urban and mountain areas. The social, political and economic marginalisation of rural communities and the loss of their rich rural cultural and natural heritage and the resulting hydrogeological instability and fires make it essential to critically reflect on current and past approaches and provide new tools for planning a sustainable future for rural areas, especially in the light of future climate change scenarios, both in terms of territorial justice and fairness in the geographical distribution of services and opportunities as well as by an economic and environmental point of view, and, thus, a revitalised role of local communities. There is an urgent need to look at rural areas in their multiple and intimately connected dimensions well visible looking at the process of abandonment from an historical perspective and to scientifically compare different perspectives and procedures for their possible future planning considering and verifying their social, environmental and cultural effects. Present education and career paths are strongly disciplinary oriented and do not allow to build up the competencies and perspectives to reconstruct, recollect and rethink the links and interconnections between phenomena and areas of knowledge. CLOE addresses this challenge through an interdisciplinary and inter-sectoral DP developed by UniGe, in collaboration with a network of host academic and non-academic organisations. Combining historical, environmental and legal perspectives, CLOE adopts a multidisciplinary approach to mountain and rural sustainable development and conservation. The starting point is overcome the urban centred perspective connecting phenomena and processes through an historical understanding of the abandonment, and to contribute to plan a sustainable future. CLOE is designed to offer a distinctive approach to doctoral training and supervision. ESRs are following a rich training programme: common core courses, international workshops, visiting research periods abroad, and secondments in partner research centers. The 15 ESRs are working on 4 closely related topics: Mountain areas and heritagisation processes; Mountain conservation, cultural landscapes and conflicts; Coming back to the mountains; Mountain areas and environmental risks.Today’s education and career-development paths tend to prize a rigid disciplinary orientation. While cultivating a stable common ground to build career paths in both the public and private sector, such a unique training programme is a starting point for new and impactful interdisciplinary research on sustainable development, environmental and cultural conservation, considering historical dynamics which lead to present situation.The context of CLOE project are inland areas and their prospective to become attractive for young generations and innovative enterprises. The issues addressed are the co-existence of consolidated cultures and lifestyles with new technologies and approaches, in order to invert the current trend of depopulation of rural areas and avoid natural and social extreme events. It results extremely important for the society to reach a new equilibrium between cities’ human forced aggregation and underexploited countryside, where resources fade without political countermeasures and effective commitment. The idea of “community” is now pervading several topics, originating from social domain and extending towards energy and information management. The objective of the CLOE project is to reinforce an attitude characterizing UniGe, which stated Sustainability as main keyword of its Strategic Plan 21-26, as well as addressed the attention towards extreme events by establishing a Strategic Centre on Security Risk and Vulnerability, coupled with a homonymous PhD Course. CLOE ESRs benefit of residential PhD “conventional” course and profit of dedicated educational instances with the aim at becoming experts in the recovery and restoration of inland areas.
The main result achieved so far by CLOE ESRs is a self-consciousness, being part of a special project and acting as pioneers for possible future reiteration of a COFUND project. Both ESRs and supervisors still can appreciate elements of collaboration in research, common educational needs which suggest dedicated courses, sharable case studies and field experiences, contamination of multiple expertise in comprehensive final works for PhD defense. So far, considerable results have been achieved in redirecting the responsibility of monthly seminars from both PI and supervisors towards ESRs’ couples or triples. In this context CLOE seminars and workshops are a key element in the training programme: they are aimed to allow the disciplinary and interdisciplinary exchange within the whole CLOE group, and, meanwhile, to offer an occasion for ESRs to acquire new organisational skills and to build, enlarge their scientific network and to grow up as scientific truly interdisciplinary. The active involvement of all the ESRs and supervisors in these monthly meetings naturally lead to the idea to plan periodic two days workshops&fieldworks in the case study areas of the ESRs.
As the research is being developed as part of doctoral project at this stage no research results could be reported, while the training concept and the format that CLOE is experimenting represents itself a result and promises to have a deep impact in the conception of future doctoral and master programmes planned in UniGe and in the partners involved in the project. Complexity is often still tackled according to disciplinary approach, while CLOE tries to form specialists able to understand multiple items that characterize an uneven use of the available territorial resources. In CLOE point of view, usual emphasis linked to innovation inside specific topics is continuously and incrementally joined with complementary high-level competences, pointing towards comprehensive researchers either able to provide innovation in education and research, or to provide knowledge transfer instances (such as spin-off companies) associated to mountain and rural areas, preferably abandoned or dismissed. The research carried out during the project will be summarised in policy briefing and will be useful for designing of new policies and show a strong potential of societal impact, offering new tools, based on the interconnection of historical, legal and environmental and economic perspectives to plan their management, and to propose solutions to stop their abandonment.Research topics of the 15 ESRs are covering different aspects of the mountain research (diversity and recognition of local practices, habits, and lifestyles, the social and distributive implications of rural-urban migration, and environmental risk and its mitigation, the social and historical dimension of the landscapes, conflicts related to mountain conservation, etc.) and through workshops and periodic meetings are starting to identify links and interconnections between phenomena and the areas of knowledge around mountains.