TRIGGER has fully achieved its two main general objectives by providing EU institutions with new knowledge and tools to enhance their actorness, effectiveness and influence in global governance, and in developing new ways to harness the potential of public engagement and participatory foresight in complex governance decisions. Yet, slight changes were made to increase the relevance and coherence of the project, but also to adapt to the challenges brought by the Covid-19 pandemic. In particular:
- TRIGGER helped advance the state of the art in understanding the evolution of global governance. The related datasets and reports are now freely available on the AGGREGATOR website. In this regard, TRIGGER researchers shaped new knowledge on the evolution of the EU’s interaction with global governance, and in particular the so-called “actorness” and “effectiveness”. Building up on the AGGREGATOR datasets, partners of the project have created comprehensive case studies (or ‘Deep Dives’) on four key topics: sustainable development, data protection, climate policy and EU-Africa partnership. These Deep Dives include qualitative and quantitative assessments of the level of EU actorness and effectiveness. As part of TRIGGER, several webinars were organised also in cooperation with other institutions (for example, ESPAS) and on a variety of topics connected to global governance and the EU, for instance EU’s role in the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis (CEPS, December 2020), “Trends and Shifts in Global Governance” (May 2021) and “Digital transformation and trends in artificial intelligence” (Kyrgyzstan, April 2022).
- TRIGGER also helped better understand how global governance and emerging technologies interact, and what role the EU plays in this respect, in particular in its role of “regulatory superpower”. Several papers related to open source technologies, distributed ledger technologies and artificial intelligence have been published in this respect, further disseminated in workshops and related events. These contributions also triggered a rapid reflection on the EU’s actorness levels in each of these areas, which was subject to a rapid assessment in a bootcamp in September 2020. The TRIGGER work on governing technology and governing “by” technology culminated in a workshop and recommendations for governance of AI systems in Europe (Florin 2022).
- Another dimension of the TRIGGER project was connected to foresight and the identification of emerging trends. Each of the four Deep Dives includes an extensive chapter on both global and EU governance in the respective domains and puts governance structures in relation to the EU’s actorness and effectiveness.
- Finally, TRIGGER has produced extensive reports on four foresight scenarios and further developed the foresight methodology. These scenarios were also the basis for setting up a new Strategy Group on “Berlin Futures” at the Institute for European Politics in Berlin/Germany, where workshops were held to discuss the scenarios (and resulting policy implications), with participants from across German Federal ministries, the chancellery, parliament and civil society. Moreover, the foresight team has worked to link the citizen engagement tool COCTEAU with user-friendly foresight scenarios. Lastly, AGGREGATOR and COCTEAU have been finalised and PERSEUS has united the different tools and research.
