SPRING will develop a toolbox to improve the innovation, effectiveness and sustainability of the work done by Europe’s integration stakeholders at national, regional and local levels. The SPRING consortium brings together some of Europe’s most well-connected integration researchers, think-tanks and stakeholder networks. Mobilizing their significant research, networks and communications capacities, the SPRING partners will identify and engage with the main researchers and communities of practice on integration: national and local policymakers and public sector, NGOs, business and grassroots initiatives (i.e. local volunteers, migrant leaders, and religious groups). These communities will shape the project’s activities through piloted participatory techniques for needs assessments, co-designing activities and the identification of solutions and policy implications. SPRING will then gather, summarise and share the best available research and evidence on the effectiveness, innovation, transferability, sustainability and evaluation methods for integration policies and practice. This evidence will summarise the findings of EU projects funded under Horizon 2020, AMIF, European Social Fund and Erasmus+ as well as relevant public and private donors. Summarising this evidence, SPRING will collect, create and disseminate the most usable and practical materials, such as examples of good practice, handbooks, pieces of training, templates, databases and contact lists. The SPRING online portal and repository, combined with the consortium’s communications task force and social media strategies, will make this evidence more accessible by curating the content and form to match the specific profile and needs of these communities of practice.

The policies driving the green and digital transitions, or twin transitions, are intended to level the field to achieve the European Growth Model and attain the EU Green Deal and the UN’s SDGs. However, these policies have had unintended and unforeseen effects, creating new inequalities and/or aggravating existing ones. Those primarily affected are social groups already at risk and EU’s most vulnerable regions. Public authorities and policy-makers at local, national and European levels therefore need evidence-based understanding of these inequalities and concrete ways to prevent and/or mitigate these. The READJUST project aims to suggest policy options for overcoming these (potential) trade-offs between efficiency and equality in twin transitions, in the key sectors of mobility and agri-food. The green and digital policies are intended to level the field for attaining SDGs; however, they may return uneven distribution of access to the transitions and their benefits. READJUST aims to suggest options for overcoming the perceived trade-off between efficiency and equality in policy and to make inclusive growth a reality. Policymakers portray a future that is green and digital for the EU, and they aim to continuously contain the unintended consequences of the green and digital transitions in terms of inequalities. Generating zero negative effects on the climate can be efficiently achievable by twining green and digital transitions. Nonetheless, individually and jointly, the transitions might widen the existing inequality gaps. This project aims to contribute to policies for fair and just twin transitions to mitigate existing inequalities driven by the twin transitions and minimize the transitions’ unintended consequences for equality. In this project, we strive to address the inequalities created or exacerbated by the twin transitions policies in certain domains. Policies of green and digital transitions which are aimed at the growth of the entirE, or its subsections.

Despite the polarization in public and policy debates generated by the post-2014 fluxes of refugees, asylum applicants and migrants, European countries need to work out an evidence-based way to deal with migration and asylum rather than a prejudice-based one. The proposed project, SIRIUS, builds on a multi-dimensional conceptual framework in which host country or political-institutional, societal and individual-related conditions function either as enablers or as barriers to migrants’, refugees’ and asylum seekers’ integration via the labour market. SIRIUS has three main objectives: A descriptive objective: To provide systematic evidence on post-2014 migrants, refugees and asylum applicants especially women and young people and their potential for labour market employment and, more broadly, social integration. An explanatory objective: To advance knowledge on the complexity of labour market integration for post-2014 migrants, refugees and asylum applicants, and to explore their integration potential by looking into their spatial distribution (in relation to the distribution of labour demand across the labour market), while taking into account labour market characteristics and needs in different country and socio-economic contexts. A prescriptive objective: To advance a theoretical framework for an inclusive integration agenda, outlining an optimal mix of policy pathways for labour market integration including concrete steps that Member States and other European countries along with the EU can take to ensure that migrant-integration policies and the broader system of workforce-development, training, and employment programmes support new arrivals’ access to decent work opportunities and working conditions. SIRIUS has a mixed methods approach and innovative dissemination plan involving online priority action networks, film essays, festival, job fair and an applied game along with scientific and policy dialogue workshops and conferences.

REAL DEAL will stimulate a pan-European debate to reshape citizens? and stakeholders? active participation through deliberative processes around the European Green Deal. It brings together researchers and practitioners of deliberative democracy from a wide range of disciplines including environmental rights and the law of public participation, ethics and responsible innovation, gender studies and ecofeminism, psychology, geography, urban planning and sustainability studies. It includes the EU?s largest civil society networks advocating on the environment, climate, sustainable development, local democracy and the European movement. It teams up with youth climate, social justice and women?s organisations, SMEs, universities and research institutes, mobilising networks with thousands of CSOs, uniting millions of citizens and activating contacts to thousands of policymakers. In a large co-creation exercise, REAL DEAL will develop, test and validate innovative tools and formats to propel deliberative democracy to the next level. It will tests its innovations at citizens assemblies for the transition in at least 13 countries. We will scrutinise pan-European formats ranging from digital deliberation through our online platform www.CitizensGreenDeal.eu to in-person processes such as an Assembly for a Gender-Just Green Deal and a pan-European Youth Climate Assembly. REAL DEAL will co-create a comprehensive protocol for meaningful citizens? participation and deliberation to work towards the objectives of the EGD. It will validate recommendations on how to design such processes and how they can be applied by European institutions, Member States and civil society alike. Gender equality will be embedded into the project?s DNA. It pays specific attention to the leave-no-one-behind principle, fostering the engagement of disenfranchised groups that are disproportionally burdened by environmental damage. REAL DEAL will develop a new model of environmental citizenship across Europe.