The TROPICO project (Transforming into Open, Innovative and Collaborative Governments) aims to comparatively examine how public administrations are transformed to enhance collaboration in policy design and service delivery, advancing the participation of public, private and societal actors. It will analyse collaboration in and by governments, with a special emphasis on the use of information and communication technologies (ICT), and its consequences. Assessing the institutional conditions and individual drivers and barriers is crucial for understanding the transformation of governments towards greater collaboration. The state structures and administrative traditions provide different 'starting points' of the public sectors in Europe. Likewise, individual attitudes, skills, and expertise of officials play a decisive role in understanding this transformation. Subsequently, TROPICO will examine collaboration practices within governments (internal) and between public, private and societal actors (external), across a variety of policy sectors. We will study the actors and means of innovative collaboration, including ICT, and how they are interlinked. Lastly, assessing the effects of collaboration for legitimacy, accountability and government efficiency is essential to provide a comprehensive analysis of the transformation towards open, innovative, and collaborative governments. Our multidisciplinary project will follow a truly comparative approach, examining ten countries representing the five administrative traditions in Europe: Nordic (Norway, Denmark), Central and Eastern European (Estonia, Hungary), Continental (Netherlands, Germany), Napoleonic (France, Spain; Belgium (mixed)), and Anglo-Saxon (United Kingdom). We will combine rigorous quantitative and qualitative research methods. TROPICO puts a strong emphasis on the inclusion of stakeholders and users throughout the project to test and reflect upon the applicability of our key findings and policy recommendations.

During recent years, universities in the participant countries of this project, have set internationalisation goals, both to compensate declining populations (especially in Estonia and Hungary) as well as to stay competitive. Together with a wave of migration, which also affects these countries at different intensity, the four participating countries have faced a new demographic situation. Although the number of immigrants, whether foreign students or other, may be not significant, there are debates in the society about the immigration, on one hand, and on the other hand schools and universities have to adapt to a changing student profile. Issues can raise when there are students from different backgrounds in the classroom whose views may be conflicting between each other or with those expressed by the teacher. But even without a diverse classroom, certain topics can be controversial, like pay gap, political conflicts or ethnic issues. So far, universities in this project countries have paid little attention on how to address these issues neutrally without creating unnecessary conflicts, and it has been up to the teacher to find the most suitable method.The objective of this project is to gather the expertise of four countries facing similar challenges, Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic and Estonia, involving experts from the associated partner from Sweden, and to develop guidance material for educators from universities and general education. This material will discuss the nature of issues related to ethnicity, gender, religion or political behaviour and, the most importantly, introduce didactics to teach awareness, develop empathy and respond to controversy, handle offensive comments, create safe environment as a prerequisite for inclusion. These didactical tools will be developed jointly, in English and later adapted to local needs and translated into local languages for reaching a wider audience. The participants of the project are firstly around 30 teachers of the participating institutions. The target of around 300 people will be outreached by multiplier events, organised by every partner at the end of the project and gathering educators, education ministries and relevant NGOs. Meanwhile, at least 800 people during the last year of the project is expected to be affected by the project results due to the use of didactic material and MOOCs developed in the course of the project. As the materials will be publicly available and promoted to social and youth workers, the numbers can be even higher.The main output of the project is a didactic material adapted into an e-course for universities and school teachers. This e-course will be run in local language (except in Hungary) at least once a year. Three MOOCs on Islam, gender issues and radicalisation will be developed for a larger audience and run at least once a year. In addition to that, a methodological toolbox for teachers will be developed and publicly available. In addition to intellectual outputs, the consortium will organise two in-service trainings for teachers on addressing sensitive issues in the classroom, and multiplier events for a larger audience tailored for specific needs in every partner country.In order to reach the objectives, experts from the partner universities as well as the associated partner will contribute with their expertise both to building the content and developing the methodology. Each partner university is responsible for each intellectual output, which will be tested and assessed through trainings. The e-courses and MOOCs launched during the third year of the project will provide valuable feedback meant to improve the materials.At the end of this project, teachers will possess necessary skills and tools for creating meaningful and academically relevant discussions on sensitive issues in well-rounded and inclusive environment. The universities overall will benefit from being able to tackle and respond to challenges that internationalisation may originate. The materials developed during the project can be easily adapted to other contexts where it might be used, i.e. social work, youth work, NGOs, local communities, etc.In a long term benefit, the project consortium believes to contribute to calm, balanced and constructive discussions on sensitive issues in the multicultural modern society.

ETHOS seeks to provide building blocks for the development of the an empirically informed European theory of justice by (a) refining and deepening the knowledge on the European foundations of justice - both historically based and contemporary envisaged; (b) enhancing the awareness of the mechanism that impede the realisation of the justice ideals that live in contemporary Europe; (c) advancing the understanding of the process of drawing and re-drawing of the boundaries of justice (fault lines); and (d) providing guidance to politicians, policy makers, advocacies and other stakeholders on how to design and implement policies to reserve inequalities and prevent injustice. In ETHOS approach, justice is not merely an abstracted moral ideal of universal reach that is worth striving for. It is predominantly a continuously re-enacted and re-constructed, "lived" experience, embedded in firm legal, political, moral, social, economic and cultural institutions that are geared to giving members of society what is their due. In ETHOS project, justice will be studied in its interdependence between the ideal and the real, the normative and the practical, the formal and the informal - all set in the highly complex institutions of modern European societies. To enhance the formulation of an empirically based theory of justice, ETHOS will explore the normative underpinnings of justice and its practical realisation in four heuristically defined domains of justice (social justice, economic justice, political justice, and civil and symbolic justice), as revealed in: (a) philosophical and political tradition, (b) legal framework, (c) daily (bureaucratic) practice, (d) current public debates, and (e) the accounts of the vulnerable populations in six European countries (the Netherlands, the UK, Hungary, Austria, Portugal and Turkey). The question of boundary drawing and re¬drawing and the fault lines of justice will permeate the whole investigation.