Objectives:
The superordinate objective of the call is to strengthen capacities in research and civil society, economy and politics to deal with the accelerated and intensified consequences of global change in mountain regions. In order to understand coherencies and interdependencies between physical, chemical, geological, hydrological, hydraulic, biological and political, socio-economic and cultural processes and to open up options to act not only orientation knowledge but also expert knowledge and transformation knowledge are necessary.
The development of this knowledge requires interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary accesses by using all available information that involves scientific, demographic, socio-economic and technical data, and other approaches from planning and social sciences and the humanities. The complexity of the issues, which may only be processed in a societal context, also requires the promotion of participatory structures by making use of existing knowledge and the willingness to create new knowledge in the population.
Developing, linking and making available such knowledge is in the central focus of the present call. In doing so the programme shows two distinctive features that should become clear in the project applications.
It aims at
- interdisciplinary and, at the same time, transdisciplinary projects that mobilise and bring together methodologies from different disciplines;
- high-risk-high-potential projects that follow extraordinary and high-risk academic approaches.
Another objective of the ESS programme is to promote networking and collaboration between disciplines and research groups. Here the ESS forms an interface between Austrian science and the international research landscape.
Research topic
The topic of "Resilience of Mountain Regions" is a highly up-to-date, cross-cutting issue both from a scientific and political perspective. It is excellently suited for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations between the most different academic disciplines. The exact definition of the term "Resilience" is different in different disciplines (e.g. hydrology, ecology, geosciences, social sciences and the humanities, engineering). In general the term describes the ability of a system, be it an ecosystem, an individual, a city, a technical system, an economic system or a society, to react to disruptions to existing circumstances. These system disruptions can occur suddenly or creepingly.
