As part of CEU's participation in the Horizon Europe-funded project consortium BRRIDGE, CEU’s pro-rector and DPP professor Ágnes Bátory and DPP’s head Martin Kahanec welcomed a team of researchers from Matej Bel University (UMB) led by UMB's rector Vladimír Hiadlovský and the project's leaders Alexandra Bitušíková, Kamila Boršeková and Jozef Mintál for a two-day research workshop at CEU in Vienna. BRRIDGE’s aim is to twin UMB with partners across Europe — Central European University, European University Institute, and the National University of Ireland Galway — with the ambition of building research excellence in the domain of democracy and policy at UMB, as well as to advance the research management and administration capacity of UMB, while generating knowledge that contributes to the quality of democracy in Slovakia and in Europe.
In 2023, in anticipation of Slovakia’s early elections in September, the project focuses on four specific objectives: strategic networking, building capacities, strengthening excellence in research, and fostering democracy through community and policy engagement. A crucial pillar for a higher engagement of civil society is the creation of the Democracy Living Lab in the Banská Bystrica Self-Governing Region (Central Slovakia), which was intensively discussed at the workshop. Also, the aim was to identify and narrow down current challenges for local democracy in the region in order to draft joint research projects with the project consortium partners.
The workshop also addressed multiple questions of institutional learning and knowledge transfer in the field of digitalization, academic communication, and project management.