The Danube Participation Day gathers representatives from civil society organisations, local, regional and national public authorities, university and research from the 14 partner countries of the EU Strategy for the Danube Region (EUSDR), representatives from the region's governance as well as from European and international organisations. The aim is to foster cooperation and participation for better development in the Danube Region. Thus, the Danube Participation Day serves as a platform for exchanging views and perceptions among each other, discussing good-practices of participatory governance and project implementations as well as for getting involved with decision-makers.

The 4th Danube Participation Day took place at Andrassy University in Budapest. Our project leader, dr. Jani Kozina, joined the Working group I: Participation Partnership - A research perspective.

The Working Group started with an introduction on the Agenda for Participation and the envisaged Participation Partnerships as an ongoing process of communication and cooperation. Four speakers talked about participation from different perspectives:

• Robert Braun (Institute for Advanced Studies Vienna),
• Jaroslava Szüdi (PAC 7),
• Robert Müller-Török (Hochschule Ludwigsburg),
• Melanie Plangger (University of Innsbruck) .

Next on the agenda was the discussion with all participants along the following guiding questions:

• What is the role of research for participation in the Danube Region in terms of better governance?
• How to promote participatory governance in order to enhance capacities for multi-level governance?
• What do Managing Authorities and public authorities need in order to better communicate with researchers?

In the first part of the discussion, which was focused on the state-of-play and examples of participation in research and academic field, dr Kozina introduced AgriGo4Cities project as a good example of participative governance.

See full event's details here.