After two draft conclusions put forward by the Spanish Presidency of the EU Council (see EUROPE 13266/11, 13213/17), the Member States’ ambassadors to the EU seem to have found a landing place at the Council’s Coreper I meeting on 17 November on draft conclusions on strengthening the role and impact of research and innovation in the EU's policy-making process. The draft conclusions will be submitted to the European Research Ministers for approval at the EU Council meeting on 8 December.
The aim of these conclusions was to highlight the potential of research and innovation in improving the quality and coherence of policy-making processes and to underline the importance of public policies based on scientific information and knowledge.
Most of the changes made by the second draft conclusions have been incorporated into the new wording of the conclusions. The structure of the text has been changed very slightly, to make it clearer.
The new text devotes a point to the crucial importance of open science in giving decision-makers and society access to scientific knowledge of the highest quality. The draft text stresses that this access to knowledge can help build resilience in the face of disinformation and strengthen confidence in knowledge and evidence-informed policy-making.
The regional dimension of Research and Innovation (R&I) ecosystems has been further emphasised in the latest draft conclusions. The draft text emphasises the responsibility of national and regional governments in supporting these regional ecosystems, alongside the responsibility of the EU. The text calls for better coordination of innovation ecosystems and better use of R&I capacities and resources at all levels of governance.
The draft text has also retained the call to remedy regional disparities in innovation within the EU, in particular through exchanges and cooperation between Europe's more innovative regions and its less innovative ones.
The draft conclusions have retained a large chapter devoted to the impact of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), the main instrument of the Next Generation EU recovery package, on the main objectives of R&I policies and the objectives of the European Research Area (ERA).
The project highlights how these funds can improve investment in R&I and encourage reforms to boost research ecosystems. The implementation of synergies between this funding and other types of funding, including European programmes and instruments, remains, according to the draft conclusions, both one of the main challenges and an opportunity to complete the strengthening of Europe's scientific and technological foundations.
Link to the latest draft conclusions: https://aeur.eu/f/9mt (Original version in French by Émilie Vanderhulst)