The first year focused on the development and implementation of the whole of work package 1. This was centred around three sets of activities. First, we produced an online database of local and regional initiatives that were relevant to the EU Green Deal. These totalled 2,000 database entries and spanned all Green Deal policy areas and European geographies. Second, we established collaborative relationships with our sister Green Deal projects, as well as other relevant EU initiatives such as the Horizon Europe Missions. We developed these relationships through a series of informal interviews that focused on synergies and how we may best work together over the course of the five-year project. Third, in partnership with stakeholders, we ran a series of Transition Arena events that focused on the six Green Deal policy areas that experiments our looking into. The interest in these Arenas was on transformative pathways necessary for delivering the much-needed Green Deal policy objectives.
The second and third years focused on the co-creation, implementation and analysis of our six experiment streams. Our streams are: preserving biodiversity, energy-efficient renovations, clean energy, sustainable mobility, sustainable food, and circular economy. With input gained from the European Commission, the consortium produced Implementation Plans, which then fed into the successful recruitment of subcontractors (or what we call local partners), who helped us deliver on these implementation plans. We received a considerable amount of interest from NGOs and municipalities, with 950+ and 349 submitting Expressions of Interest and Final Applications respectively. Subsequently, 24 local partners were selected, trained and closely collaborated with. The experiments themselves involved working with 3173 citizens and 1368 professionals; 245 interviews were subsequently conducted relating to participant experience, alongside additional data collected through local partner monthly surveys and consortium partner fieldnotes.
Supporting cross-cutting work was also delivered. For instance, Work Package 6 on evaluation produced two Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) deliverables, which defined how our project considered responsibility and set out plans for how we will achieve this internally within the consortium and also externally with participants and our local partners. Work Package 8 on policy and governance additionally did a documentary analysis of all key EC policy documents connected to the EU Green Deal, which provides excellent foundations for us to ensure that our work remains policy-relevant moving forward. A range of communications (WP9), coordination (WP10), and ethics (WP11) deliverables were also successfully submitted.
