Schmidt, Ban win Horizon 2020 Grant
Vivien Schmidt and Cornel Ban have become key researchers in the EU Commission funded grant through the “Horizon 2020” program, the biggest EU research and innovation program ever.
“ENLIGHTEN 2015-2018: European Legitimacy in Governing through Hard Times: The Role of European Networks” is the full title of the grant which Schmidt and Ban will research.
ENLIGHTEN is a collaborative project coordinated at the Copenhagen Business School (CBS). In addition to BU professors Schmidt and Ban, the project brings together researchers from CBS as well as the University of Amsterdam, the Central European University and Université Libre de Bruxelles and non-academic partners Tax Justice Network, European Trade Union Confederation, Finance Watch and Housing Europe. The Chief Scientist of the ENLIGHTEN project is Professor Leonard Seabrooke, Department of Business and Politics, CBS.
ENLIGHTEN addresses the ways in which the EU’s modes of governance cope with hard times on short-term and long-term issues. The ENLIGHTEN project suggests that an understanding of temporal issues is crucial to dealing with hard times and for the legitimacy of the European project overall.
It distinguishes between Europe’s “fast-burning” and “slow-burning” crises, setting out to compare the ways in which EU policy actors have attempted to deal with them. The project maps how European institutions and expert networks handle these crises, and what European modes of governance relate are suited to addressing these crises.
ENLIGHTEN applies this approach to the study of a range of policy fields that are widely accepted as being critical to both the sustainability of Europe’s continent-wide coordinated governance architecture and the responsiveness of Europe’s democratic polity.
The three policy fields specifically addressed are:
- Banking Crisis and Fiscal Sustainability;
- Deficit Reduction and Continuity of Public Services; and
- Youth Employment and Inclusive Growth.
Prof. Schmidt will focus on the theoretical issues surrounding legitimacy and EU institutional actors. Prof. Ban will focus on questions related to the Banking Crisis and Fiscal Sustainability, as well as expert networks linked to EU institutional actors.
Cornel Ban is the co-director of the Global Economic Governance Initiative. Schmidt is the director for the Center for the Study of Europe.