Final Report Summary - DREAM (Disability Rights Expanding Accessible Markets)
The DREAM project (disability rights expanding accessible markets) was established in 2011. Supported by funding from the Marie Curie Initial Training Network programme, its main objective was to train the next generation of ‘disability policy entrepreneurs’ – thinkers and actors who could help bring about positive change for Europe’s estimated 80 million citizens with disabilities.
Fourteen early stage researchers were recruited and hosted by a network of seven leading academic and research institutions right across Europe including the University of Leeds, Maastricht University, NOVA Norwegian Research Institute, the University of Iceland, the Swiss Paraplegic Institute (in association with the University of Lucerne) and Technosite (Madrid). It was led by the Centre for Disability Law & Policy at the National University of Ireland (Galway).
The initial idea for such a network came from the fact that the European Union (in addition to most of its Member States) had ratified the United National Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities in 2009. This made sweeping legal and policy change in the field of pan-European disability law and policy inevitable. Although there were several academic research programmes in Europe dedicated to the study and understanding of disability, there were virtually no programmes dedicated to training research students to become agents of change to help translate the UN convention into actionable lines of policy and legislative reform. So the main intention behind the network was to up-skill the next generation of policy entrepreneurs who could play a meaningful role in a process of change that was – and is – destined to get bigger and faster.
The research philosophy of the network was designed to equip students to get beyond surface understandings and slogans to provide blueprints for change. Much academic research to that point had been too distant from policy challenges. And many policy prescriptions were too distant from a credible evidence-base. The animating idea was to bring all these research elements together and to ensure they remained relevant and practical by requiring the researchers to address discrete policy challenges. In this way the network was configured to be of maximum value in helping to realize the Europe 2020 goal of creating a ‘smart, sustainable and inclusive’ economy and society. We call this ‘scholarship in action.’
Indeed, a core assumption of the network was that the advancement of the rights of persons with disabilities could be achieved both by new kinds of social policy as well as by smart interventions in the marketplace to ensure that persons with disabilities could become economically active as entrepreneurs, workers and consumers. Like the UN Convention itself, the network saw no inherent contradiction between market empowerment and social inclusion. Pursuing both is the essence of the EU.
The work of the network was divided into three different tranches – each with their own ESR work-packages. The first tranche – ‘Core Rights’ - focused on essential preconditions that had to be met before moving on to consider social inclusion and market empowerment. It included work-packages on voice (restoring legal capacity to make decisions to persons with disabilities), independent and community living (including how to re-engineer services to serve and not entrap people). In a sense, these work-packages were all geared toward more rational public policy to centre people in their own lives.
The second tranche - ‘Harnessing Market Forces’ –focused more on people with disabilities as active market participants and on necessary changes in policy to facilitate this. The work-packages included one on how to nudge European corporate culture to see people with disabilities as active consumers, one on accessible ICT as a way of enhancing citizen participation in the marketplace for goods and services, amending copyright law to allow more access to the web for blind people.
The third tranche focuses on how to embed the positive dynamic of change at EU level and in the Member States. Work-packages included how to engage successfully with the UN monitoring mechanism to drive change as well as the development of indicator sets that would authoritatively show whether progress was being made and, if not, why not.
The three tranches were designed as a virtuous circle – the need to centre the person as the measure of themselves, the need for innovative inclusion strategies both in the economic as well as social sphere and the need to keep the process of change moving forward.
A web of prestigous secondments was arranged for the ESRs with the intention of exposing them to the complexity of the process of change and instilling in them the need to configure their research product (now, and more importantly into the future) to have maximum impact in assisting change. The included placements at the European Disability Forum (Brussels), the Mental Disability Advocacy Centre (Budapest), Interights (London), the Global Initiative for Inclusive ICTs (G3ICT), the EU Fundamental Rights Agency, the European Network on Independent Living, the European Association of Service Providers for Persons with Disabilities, etc.
The Director of the network – Professor Gerard Quinn of the National University of Ireland says: “we didn’t realize the depth of hunger the students had to contribute to the process of change. They were all passionate about their subject but even more passionate about acquiring skills to make themselves useful in the process of change. We succeeded in many unexpected ways. For example, one ESR helped to write a major policy statement for the UN on legal capacity issues, one ESR participated in the negotiation of a treaty to liberalize international copyright law for the benefit of blind persons, one assisted international organizations to help shape the EU monitoring programme, etc. This was real policy impact even within the lifespan of the project. We expect this dynamic to be sustained long afterwards are proud of the fact that our graduates won’t merely spend their professional lives explicating reality but helping to transform it for the benefit of 80 million European citizens.”