The overarching objective of POLCA is to contribute to global and national efforts in understanding the challenges of promoting good governance and the rule of law in non-Western societies. This will be achieved by designing and implementing an interdisciplinary research and training program focused on “alternative institutions and norms.” More specifically, POLCA is built around three interconnected goals: 1) To collect original empirical data and produce new theoretical insights on alternative legal and governance institutions and norms in non-Western contexts; 2) To engage with and contribute to relevant theoretical debates within law, development and governance (LDG) studies and political economy literature and thereby advance scholarly discussion on the role of non-Western institutions and norms in legal and governance reform processes; and 3) To contribute to the global law, development and governance agenda by providing strategic intelligence and policy insights for international organisations, development agencies, decision-makers, researchers and practitioners inside and outside the EU on possible ways to improve the rule of law and governance in non-Western societies. These goals will be accomplished through a multi-sited, interdisciplinary, and multisectoral research and staff exchange program involving 30 leading universities and non-academic institutions across Europe, North America, Central Asia, the Middle East and East Asia.

UPTAKE aims to facilitate the sustainable upscaling of carbon dioxide removal (CDR) methods by developing a set of robust strategies through technical, theoretical, and practical analysis accompanied by interactive dialogue within a CDR stakeholder forum. As a result, UPTAKE will develop a harmonised, comprehensive, inclusive, integrated, and transparent CDR knowledge inventory to evaluate a wide range of CDR technologies and methods, quantifying their national, European, and global costs, effectiveness, and removal potential as well as risks, constraints, and side-effects at different scales, and their prospects of technological progress. The UPTAKE approach will allow the assessment of geographical, sectoral, socioeconomic, demographic, and temporal trade-offs, co-benefits, and opportunities emerging from portfolios of different CDR methods. The enhanced socio-technical understanding of CDR methods will feed into an ensemble of state-of-the-art integrated assessment models (IAMs), which will help improve the integration of CDR methods given the EU policy objectives set for 2030, 2050, and beyond climate neutrality. UPTAKE will assess CDR governance and policy frameworks considering social acceptance, accountability, monitoring, and regulations for sustainable CDR rollout at scale. As a result, UPTAKE will generate an open and interactive CDR roadmap explorer to investigate strategies that are resilient to risks of failure and disruption, and minimise adverse impacts on society, economy, and the environment, aiming for a just, inclusive, and sustainable transition.