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Background Information: Review procedures of the EC-US S&T Agreement |
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bridges vol. 21, April 2009 / Feature Articles
The main points of the Terms of Reference were:
- Analyzing the EC-US S&T cooperative activities
- Identifying success stories and flagship projects
- Reviewing EU Member States' bilateral cooperative activities with the US
- Assessing complementarities, synergies, and overlaps between different cooperative activities with the US
- Analyzing mutual benefits of EC-US cooperation
- Identifying bottlenecks and administrative, legal, and institutional obstacles to ongoing cooperative activities
- Identifying areas with clear prospects for further developing EC-US S&T cooperation.
Methodological approach for the review:
- Analysis of existing documentation provided by the Commission services and retrieved from other sources
- Interviews with scientific officers in the Commission on different occasions in the course of the review exercise
- November 2-9, 2008: Mission to Washington, DC (see detailed program for interviews with stakeholders in US government departments and US agencies as well as with EC Delegation and S&T Counsellors of EU Member States in the Annex)
- November 2008: Online questionnaire survey of FP6 and FP7 coordinators of projects with US involvement and of US project partners (see questionnaire and results in the Annex)
- Draft Final Report delivered by the end of November 2008
- Final report delivered end of January 2009.
The different channels of information utilized provided valuable insights into and evidence of: a) the state of EC-US S&T cooperation, and b) cooperative activities of MS with the US, as well as c) indications of the present US attitude towards international S&T cooperation and perspectives for future EC-US S&T cooperation. Based on that information, the reviewers reached conclusions and developed recommendations for further strengthening the cooperation.
However, it must be emphasized that the present review was not supposed to be an in-depth evaluation of the EC-US S&T cooperation, but rather a review intended to provide a broad overview of achievements during 2004-2008 and recommendations to support decisions for future development of policies and measures for S&T cooperation.
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