While stakeholders take positions on ERA renewal, the current Finnish EU Council Presidency brought together ERA and HE Directors General for the first time.
On 1 October, the first joint conference of the Director General for Higher Education and the Director General of the European Research Area and Innovation Committee (ERAC) took place in Helsinki. Initiated and hosted by the Finnish EU Council presidency, it aimed to establish stronger links between European research and higher education and to better connect the European Research Area (ERA) and the European Higher Education Area (EHEA). Both Directors General emphasised that education and research would depend on each other to fully implement the ERA and to establish a strong EHEA by 2025. With education still being a national or even regional responsibility, human resources were considered key elements of both areas, which will be united in the portfolio of a single European Commissioner for the first time. Stronger links between research and education through a European dimension are expected to create added-value, so the Directors General.
The following ERAC meeting centred around the debate on the future of the ERA. With a view to create a new narrative for ERA, conclusions and recommendations were adopted including measures to make ERA more relevant and visible for European citizens and to make the implementation of new R&I policies more effective. Participants stressed the need to strengthen partnerships between the European Commission (EC) and the Member States and to improve the inclusiveness of ERA in order to increase excellence all over the continent.
In the Lisbon Treaty, ERA is defined as a unified research area that enables free circulation for researchers, scientific knowledge and technology. Being open to the world and based on the Internal Market, the ERA aims to enhance Europe’s competitiveness and to find solutions to global challenges.
However, a shared view of the value and the aims of an ERA does not mean everyone agrees on how to implement it. With a new Commission to take office and a multiannual financial framework (MFF) to be agreed upon, Brussels-based stakeholders use in the meantime the opportunity to contribute to the debate on how to develop the ERA.
Science Europe, an association of major research funding and performance organisations, called for the “uncompromising promotion of scientific excellence” and the development of scientific capacity in all ERA regions. It stressed the need for better integration of the scientific community in European policymaking and emphasised the value of academic freedom and institutional autonomy in order to build a stronger and more effective ERA.
These arguments were also reflected in the new position paper on the future of ERA of CESAER, the Conference of European Schools for Advanced Engineering Education and Research. Acknowledging the strong achievements in ERA during the last years, CESAER called for a “revitalisation of efforts” by leveraging these achievements to establish a “reinforced narrative”. It further demanded that ERA’s main focus should remain on research while better exploiting the legal provisions on ERA laid out in the Treaty of the Functioning of the EU (TFEU), notably to achieve better coordination with Member State programmes as well as joint undertakings with business and industry.
While Germany prepares its upcoming EU Council presidency of the second half of 2020, the ERA is expected to rank high in its agenda. Against this background, the German Rector’s Conference recently published a position paper with five key demands for the new ERA design phase. Among them figure calls for a discussion on the fundamental values of ERA, international openness and on how to pursue brain circulation.