Agenda for Civil Society in South - East Europe “The Blue Bird”

At the beginning of the 21st century the real challenge facing the reconstruction of Southeastern Europe is the re-invention of Southeastern Europe. The main idea of the project was to come up with a policy document "Agenda for Civil Society in Southeastern Europe" in three years (by 2003) that to serve as the vision paper for development of the region in the next 20 years. The paper addresses both governments and publics and offers coherent policy strategies. The work on the Agenda was aimed to be a stimulus for opening the dis-cussion to different sectors of society and for initiating regional policy debate.
Understanding the intellectual challenge of development has persuaded us to avoid the "accession" type of questions in searching for new innovative ideas regarding SEE and to structure the project around four research groups rather than around 24 individual research projects. The ambition of the project was to stimulate researchers to integrate their findings in the common product and not to focus on projects of their own. The research was organized in four research groups, each consisting of six scholars from the region/or born in the region/ and each focusing on a specific theme. It is significant that the groups were composed of scholars from different fields of knowledge.

Period: October 2000 - October 2003

Coordinators: Ivan Krastev, Roumen Avramov, Georgy Ganev

Financing Organisations: VolkswagenStiftung, Germany; United Nations Development Program

Partners: Central European University, Budapest; Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin - Institute for Advanced Studies, Berlin