CAENTI contribution to policy developments

The objectives of the Coordination Action proposed are in clear consonance with the EU Lisbon Strategy (2000) of achieving in the next years that the European Union becomes the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-based society in the world by means of building a sustainable economic growth both from the social point of view and the environmental point of view. The objectives of this strategy have been recently ratified in the last spring Council (March 2005), claiming for their achievement an important mobilization of all government levels (local, regional, state, community) and mobilization of all sectors implied in the processes of sustainable development.

By promoting the intelligent use of territorial information, the CAENTI contributes to produce and to organise useful data for economic, social and environmental decision making in different contexts and diverse territorial environments.

The cooperative work of the investigation teams and that of the actors on the ground contributes to increase the relevancy (adaptation of the necessities to the citizenship) of analyses and tools for the design, administration and evaluation of the territorial projects that they elaborate; also contribute to generate a culture of mutual production and mutual use of information facilitating the analysis and evaluations realization shared by wide partnerships. These results allow to enlarge and to stabilize the coalitions, endowing thus with a bigger coherence to the group of actions on the territory, increasing the effectiveness of the public action. All these increase the transparency as regard to the objectives, the means used and the results of the outlined actions, which facilitates a better delimitation of public responsibilities in these processes, deepening in the democratic character of the European society.

The work with the actors addresses and enriches the research work. In turn these cooperative research processes constitute good means to improve and to upgrade the researching responsibility of the actors, which favours the appropriation of the evaluation research instruments and the incorporation in their habitual administration practices.

The actors’ biggest training increases their autonomy so much for the realization of the analyses as for the production of their own tools. Another consequence of this increment of the agents' responsibilities is that this fact facilitates the demand of theories and more and more sophisticated instruments, adjusted to the reality and, or, to its necessities to the research teams. This means a permanent stimulus for the work of the research teams and the advance of the scientific progress in the field of the social sciences.

Finally, another prominent element of this proposal is that most university research teams members of the Consortium are formed by professors that teach all levels of higher education (grades, post-grades and doctorates) in subjects and matters highly related to sustainable territorial development (economy and management, geography, sociology, social work, sciences of work, sustainable local development, environmental sciences, computer science, etc.). The increase of the coordination of their integrative activity and the derivative narrowing of links of the same one will rebound very positively in the coordination of its educational work reinforcing thus, the European Area of Higher Education. The intense participation of the members of the Consortium in training programs addressed to professionals of the public and private sectors related to the sustainable development, also contributes to the reinforcement of the lifelong learning culture that the European Union tries to promote.