CAENTI relevance to the objectives of the specific programme and/or thematic priority

CAENTI (Coordination Action of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence) plans to constitute a coordination-action; one of the FP6 suggested instruments, aiming at “ Integrating and Strengthening the European Research Area”. It targets the objective of the seventh priority “ Citizens and governance in a knowledge based society”. The specific activities of this priority aim to “ mobilise in a coherent effort, in all their wealth and diversity, European research capacities in economic, political, social sciences and humanities that are necessary to develop an understanding of, and to address issues related to, the emergence of the knowledge-based society and new forms of relationships between its citizens, on one hand, and between its citizens and institutions, on the other”.

CAENTI, which gathers research teams and territorial actors belonging to seven European countries, will be able to coordinate research and field actions so far implemented in a strict national framework, to confront the results and give them a European dimension, which will establish a "bonus" in terms of knowledge and capacity of intervention.

CAENTI whose research activities are currently conducted in a dozen European countries within the framework of local projects of fight against poverty, socioeconomic inclusion of discriminated persons, intercultural integration and territorial development, will be all the more able to reach these objectives that:

• it will develop a multi-field approach of the problems of the territorial development by mobilizing researchers in the social sciences and humanities (notably in economy, in geography, sociology, history and philosophy), but also in information and communication sciences and technologies, computer sciences and statistics;
• it will confront the contributions of various academic research teams and field experiments;
• it will elaborate protocols and standards so as to cover "the need for large scale comparative data-sets of wide applicability for social sciences and humanities research can be covered by proposals to this topic";
• it will spread simple, economical and friendly tools among territorial actors to elaborate, manage, observe and estimate their projects. The territorial actors will experiment them and will evaluate them so as to improve their accessibility and their efficiency in specific territorial, institutional and professional contexts. In the territorial scale, this evaluation implies the confrontation of global problems and regional context in articulation with institutional and decision-making levels;
• it will propose technological solutions which are scientifically validated and in accordance with the requirements of the European Union in project management, evaluation and in respect of the principles of the sustainable development: participation of the citizens, well-balanced global approach and partnership of the actors;
• it will spread within the human and social sciences the fundamental tools of spatial analysis and territorial information processing which constitute the base of the professional tools;
• it will lead research in accordance with the ethical principles of the sustainable development, which requires the analysis of possible connections between the territorial intelligence, the democracy and the citizenship.

Besides, The CAENTI project subscribes to the principle of “ assisting the development of European infrastructures for comparative research in the social sciences and humanities” research domain, in the thematic “ Promotion and support for comparative research, methodologies and data generation” of which “ the objective is to promote and support comparative research through the development and diffusion of tools, methodologies, research designs and large scale data-sets of wide applicability for comparative research and across disciplines”. The operational objectives of CAENTI cover exactly this objective (cf. B.1.). The activities dedicated to improving “the spreading of fundamental methods and research design in territorial information analysis within the social sciences and humanitie s” (WP4) and to the “design and dissemination of methods and tools of territorial intelligence accessible to the territorial actors and respectful of sustainable development ethics” (WP6) will answer to the issue concerning “ the development of new (or improvement of existing) methods and tools (quantitative / qualitative) for comparative research”. It is a question of “ generic methods and/or tools of wide applicability in different fields and disciplines”. They will be applied, on the one hand, first at the social sciences and humanities research teams level and, on the other hand, at the territorial actors of sustainable development level. These two activities propose to dedicate special interest in “ the challenges and opportunities posed by rapidly expanding data-recording and processing capacities”. The participants have developed several local observatories by mobilising local actor-based partnerships and by involving users in a participative approach in France, Spain Belgium, Hungary and Romania. They have also developed national observatories articulated with regional observatories. The comparison of local contexts is part of their current concerns. The major part of the participants is confronted with « the context-dependency of data and the challenges this poses in the accumulation of data over time”. These two activities described in this document (WP4 and WP6) will do their best to answer to that question. The activity “Analysis of the application of the principles of governance of the sustainable development in the territorial research-action” (WP5) offers the possibility to promote “ the diffusion of good practice in comparative research and deriving evidence”. It will specify the framework that the application of the principles of participation, partnership and integrated approach require for the application of fundamental methods and technical tools, and their consequences on research designs. It will also explore “ the interactions between governance modes and sustainable development objectives in view of identifying what governance processes and institutions can best foster sustainable development within a European knowledge based society ” “ Governance for sustainable development” by identifying impacts, potentialities, risks and the limits which contains the application of these principles.