Future INECO Events

The INECO Consortium would like to announce the first Stakeholder Workshops, to be held in Egypt, Syria and Lebanon, on the 21^st July, 10^th September and 12^th September 2007 respectively.

These events are the first in a series of stakeholder workshops to be organised by INECO in Cyprus, Tunisia, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Algeria and Morocco. The workshops aim to develop a process towards constructively engaged Integrated Water Resources Management, and lay the foundations for reaching a common understanding on what the real problems are and how these could be addressed in a commonly desired water resources management situation.

The workshops seek to strengthen the alliance between the INECO Research Team and Local Stakeholders by:

• Discussing on the focal water management problem experienced in each region;

• Promoting the development of a process where each contributor gains both a better understanding of the problem and insight on how other participants see the problem;

• Initiating the participatory involvement of stakeholders in determining, defining and evaluating alternative institutional and economic instruments towards problem mitigation.

Furthermore, the workshops will serve as a discussion forum on the problems and challenges faced by stakeholders. They will offer the opportunity for participants to share their experiences, knowledge, ideas, preferences, hopes, fears, opinions, and values.

The Joint Event, organized in Larnaca, Cyprus on October 25^th 2007 by the NOSTRUM-DSS and INECO Projects, aims at involving a larger number of researchers and other interested participants and offer the opportunity to exchange scientific knowledge and project results on different topics related to the management of water resources in the Mediterranean region.

The event open session, to which the coordinators of several EU research projects have been invited,  will be oriented towards the discussion on problems and criteria for the better coordination, dissemination and exploitation of IWRM EU-research outcomes in the Mediterranean region.

The discussion outcomes  should lead to the development of a brief discussion document addressing the following aspects:

• Concrete ideas about how to coordinate dissemination activities of different projects in order to reach a critical mass of products to be delivered to potential end-users;

• Strategies for combining the activities of projects with different timing with the aim of supporting the maintenance of a common stream of actions;

• Strategies to expand the collaboration outside the range of projects that will be represented in Cyprus;

• Strategies for improving the effectiveness of future EU-founded research.