ECPR SGEU Conference Trento (Italy)

ECPR Standing Group EU Conference Trento (Italy) 16-18 June 2016

It's beena bit silent this blog recently. It should be good of course if you can always squeeze in a moment here and there for an update. But my attention shifted, and I was busy with moving back to the Netherlands and starting up a new job.

Anyhow, about the conference. This was the first ECPR event I attended. The ECPR is the academic association of European political scientists. The conference was hosted in the city of Trento, in Northern Italy. Surrounded by mountains, with a nice historic centre, good food and friendly atmosphere. This conference focused specifically on policymaking and politics in the EU.

I presented a paper on policy integration in a session on EU environmental policy, with the case of analysing the integration process of climate change adaptation into EU coastal and marine policy. The various topics of the conference were pretty wide in scope, though all somehow related to policymaking and politics in the EU. For example, the sessions I attended were on dynamics and accountability of EU executive actors, the implications of delegating tasks either to the European Commission or the member states, the role of interest groups and stakeholders in the European Commission and various agencies, responsive representation (i.e. how and to which extent does public opinion resonate in EU decisionmaking), and effectiveness and legitimacy of EU transboundary crises management.

Plenaries were on the migration crisis and the EU’s policy and response on that, and on the future and expected main challenges of the EU. In the first plenary, on the migration crisis, there was a striking slide called “the magic formula”, with a hypercomplicated formula to distribute refugees among the member states. It was apparently proposed by the European Commission to solve the refugee crises. As the presenter explained, this technocratic proposal did not receive a lot of positive response. In the second plenary, on the future and challenges of EU, there was more explicit mentioning of the upcoming Brexit referendum. The general expectation is that a leave outcome may well be a realistic prospect. What the wider repercussions of such a leave will be, is at this stage hard to predict.

Furthermore, I learned that the trade boycott between Russia and the EU is circumvented by using Belarus (White Russia) as a go-between. Belarus is supposedly neutral. EU products are apparently brought into Belarus, relabelled as Belarusian-made and then further transported to Russia. I also learned that a gender lens may be helpful in identifying certain patterns and actors in environmental policy. Such a gender-specific lens may not seem obvious at first sight in the field of environmental policy. But for example, in the EU, 80% of groceries is in general done by women, which makes them a very important decisionmaker when it comes to food consumption patterns.

The panels in this conference tended to follow a certain format, which is maybe standard for ECPR events, but was new for me. The three, four or five presentations in a panel are done straight in a row (so no questions in between), followed by feedback from one discussant who has looked at the papers presented in that panel (quite some effort there!), then the chair collects the various comments and questions from the audience, and the panel closes with 2 minutes for each presenter to answer or reflect on the received feedback. The positive point of this format is that at least you’ve heard all the questions and thoughts floating around in the room (whether they are all answered by the presenters is actually less relevant). Very often you only hear a selection of the questions, as time has run out. On the other hand, such a format makes the dynamic not that interactive, with 4 presentations in a row.

What struck me was that most (not all) of the presentations seemed to be structured in quite a different way than I’m familiar with to communicate about academic research. I admit it was even building up to some slight irritation about this other style, when I realised that this is apparently the way it works for this group of political scientists. As this was my first ECPR event, I also feel more like a visitor, and perhaps I should just observe the differences, and not immediately label them with a certain qualification.

So what are these differences? Most (not all) of the presentations at this conference talked about the analytical framework, and elaborate on underlying assumptions, how they relate to each other and where they are derived from. Which is of course very interesting and relevant for an academic discussion. Then the remainder of the presentation talked about general findings in aggregate terms, finishing up with some conclusions. However, most (not all) the presentations tended to skip:
- Reason, context, knowledge gap
- Main research question/aim
- Testing/applying in empirical context, e.g. a policy field, sector, policy setting case, certain actor or actor constellation
- Data collection, sources used
- Breaking down of the findings with some illustrations, examples, quotes to show how it works in practice
- How the collected empirical data (if at all) was analysed
- And meaning of the findings for the wider, conceptual, literature debate

Now, there may very well be different perspectives on presentations about academic research. In my experience, the above listed ingredients tend to help get your study across. 

While there were exceptions that stood out with a substantial interesting story and a good delivery, there were also a number of speakers which spoke quite soft and monotonous, some with a heavy accent, and presenters tended to sit.

So, that were some of my observations and impressions. I don’t know how representative this ECPR event was for other ECPR events, they tend to have a quite a good reputation actually. Finally, I met a couple of nice and interesting researchers, and was very happy to have been able to visit the lovely town of Trento.