Ten years after politicians began planning a regional R&D strategy for the western Balkans, concrete results are hard to find
In 2009, regional ministers and EU representatives signed an agreement to cooperate on the plans, with the World Bank swiftly agreeing to assist. By the end of 2013, the bank had developed a Western Balkans Regional R&D Strategy for Innovation. This, it was envisaged, would channel €200 million over five to 10 years into university PhDs, technology transfer and other activities.
Funding was to come from Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia, as well as other sources including the EU. In September 2015, ministers agreed to set up a Western Balkans Research and Innovation Centre (WISE) in Split, Croatia, to coordinate implementation.
Today there is no centre and no fund. “After initial enthusiasm, challenges in coordinating the countries and mobilising the donors naturally increased,” says Paulo Guilherme Correa, a senior economist at the World Bank. “I don’t know why the EU and other donors didn’t fund implementation, even though they continued to fund many isolated initiatives on research and innovation in the region.”
The European Commission acknowledges the problem but denies responsibility. “The process towards establishing the WISE facility seems to have come to a standstill,” says a spokesperson. “This process is driven by the western Balkans beneficiaries and not by the Commission.” They add that the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme has provided more than €125m to the region since 2014.
Danica Ramljak, a World Bank expert in Zagreb, Croatia, who is interim director of the WISE centre, says “the responsibility lies with EU politicians”, who keep getting sidetracked.
One distraction, she says, is the Joint Science Conferences led by the Leopoldina, Germany’s national science academy. These are part of the Berlin Process for fostering western Balkan cooperation and EU integration, which brings together the Commission and 16 nations in the Balkans and Europe.
The conferences began in 2015, with the latest held in London in May. Focuses included communication and science in society, says Lucian Brujan, senior officer at the Leopoldina’s department of international relations.
The recommendations from the conference will feed into a political meeting at the Western Balkans Summit in Poland on 5 July. Concrete proposals include a Western Balkans Research Foundation for combating brain drain.
Brujan says that the regional strategy and the Joint Science Conferences “have nothing to do” with each other, and that the added value of the conferences is “self-evident”.
Ramljak also places some blame on the Croatian science ministry. “Croatia is the host nation, and it should have taken the initiative of founding the centre, but it hasn’t,” she says.
A ministry spokesperson blamed a lack of financial support, including from EU regional funds, but says the ministry is not giving up. “We are looking for a possibility of financing through [these funds] for the following programme period.”
Whoever is to blame for the strategy’s slow progress, Correa believes it is “still relevant and implementable”. But if the strategy is to take off, he says, it will require commitment from countries and the Commission.
This article also appeared in Research Europe