Marie Curie ITN project Resourceful Communities (RECOMS) funded by European Commission

The Marie Curie ITN project RECOMS will be funded by the European Commission, with an evaluation score of 98.6%. Dr. Alex Franklin from the Coventry University in the UK (Lead partner) and Adj. Prof. Ina Horlings of the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen wrote the proposal. The overall budget of the project is 4 million euro.

RECOMS is a Marie Sklodowska Curie (MSCA) Innovative Training Network funded by the European Commission. It is comprised of a transdisciplinary consortium of scientists, practitioners and change agents from eleven public, private and non-profit organisations located in six European Union countries. The consortium includes Rijkswaterstaat and the PeerGroup in the Netherlands, The Rachel Carson Institute, the LUKE institute (Helsinki), the BOKU institute in Vienna, The ILVO institute (Belgium), Shared Assets (UK), the Green City project and Bavaria National Park (Germany).

This project will train 15 Early Stage Researchers in transdisciplinary approaches to support resourceful and resilient community environmental practice, tackling societal challenges (e.g. food, energy and climate change), nurturing the potential of stakeholders and vulnerable groupings to create adaptive and transformative sustainability pathways. There are three connecting themes: Unlocking and Empowering; Adapting and Transforming; Collaborating and Connecting.

Community resourcefulness is the capacity of any community to work towards positively adapting or transforming their relationship with their environmental resource base in a manner that enhances community resilience. Examples include the development of renewable energy systems, community food, low impact/sustainable community housing developments, new forms of environmental health care provisioning, outdoor educational and arts initiatives and various locally autonomous forms of ‘green’ service provisioning.

For the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, this means that the Department of Spatial Planning and Environment will host 3 Early Stage Researchers (ERS) on: 1) building coalitions and socio-spatial planning; 2) adaptive community strategies and perceptions of risk; 3) a critical perspective on citizenship and responsive governance

The project emphasizes participatory action-learning and creative visualization. The joint training organised in training events includes an integrated Action-Learning Projects on Community Energy Transformation in Groningen.

For further information on the RECOMS science and training programme please see: http://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/research-directories/current-projects/2017/recoms/