The six funders of the Centre for Evaluating Complexity across the Energy-Environment-Food Nexus held a ‘bidders launch event‘ on 11 February 2015 in London, for people with an interest in bidding to run the centre.
The Centre will pioneer, test and promote innovative and inclusive methods to analyse evaluations across the energy-environment-food nexus where complexity presents an integral challenge to policy interventions.
The talks from the event are now available to download as pdfs:
- Andy Gibbs from ESRC talked about the ESRC Nexus Programme and ESRC’s vision for the Complexity Centre. He outlines the Centre’s Core aims of Leadership – identity and connectivity; Methodology development – design and improvement; Methods application – testing and practical application and Capacity building – knowledge exchange and growing capability. Download Andy’s talk from ESRC website: ESRC presentation (PDF, 508Kb).
- Dr Gillian Pratt, Deputy Director, Future Regulation at the Environment Agency, talked about the EA’s strategic and operational needs for evaluation. Download Gillian’s talk from ESRC website Environment Agency presentation (PDF, 1.8Mb).
- Dr Penny Bramwell, Director of Science, Evidence and Research and Deputy Chief Scientific Adviser at the Food Standards Agency talked about the challenges of food and food safety being part of a much bigger global picture; food supply chains are global, multi-layered and difficult to track; food prices are affected by the wider environmental factors; food production affects water, transport, climate change. Penny then outlined the FSA’s evaluation challenges: cannot afford to be adopting a narrow view; need to think about our evaluations in this wider, complex, context; need to Identify appropriate methods to evaluate complex issues holistically and the need to take account of other aspects of food, alongside partners. Download Penny’s talk from ESRC website: Food Standards Agency presentation (PDF, 2Mb).
Twitter session
@esrc will also host a Twitter session on 17 February at 13.00 to address any further questions you may have about the call. Use #complexitycentre to join the discussion.
Key dates
- ‘Bidders launch event‘ – 11 February 2015, London
- Twitter session – ESRC will also host a twitter session at 13:00 on Tues 17 Feb to address any further questions you may have about the call.
- Deadline for submitting outline proposals – 18 March 2015
- Decisions to applicants on outline stage – April 2015
- Issue call for full proposals (for successful outlines only) – April 2015
- Latest start date – 31 January 2016.
For more information about the call, please email evaluationcomplexity@esrc.ac.uk
Image credit: with thanks to PhOtOnQuAnTiQuE on Flickr.
