Foresight is increasingly used to support transnational research programming, although networks that apply it remain a minority among ERA-NETs (Haegeman et al., 2017). ERA.Net RUS (FP7-226164) was a Coordination Action under the International Cooperation activity of the FP7 Capacities Programme that aimed to link Russia to the European Research Area. It pooled the resources of funding agencies from 12 countries (seven EU Member States, four countries associated to FP7 and Russia), and its two pilot joint calls in 2011 funded 42 joint projects with a total budget of €10.3 million.
Between 2010 and 2014 a foresight exercise supported the development of sustainable science, technology and innovation (STI) cooperation between the EU Member States, the Associated Countries and Russia. It combined two strands. The structural strand addressed institutional solutions and funding instruments for cooperation: four scenarios of EU–Russia STI cooperation in 2020, ranging from 'R&D policy paradise' to 'Same problems, reORIENTation', were developed, validated in workshops and assessed for probability and desirability in a two-round Delphi survey of researchers and policy makers. The thematic strand started from a meta-analysis of foresight studies backed by expert interviews, and continued with roadmapping workshops in four fields: nanotechnologies, health, social sciences and humanities, and environment and climate change.
The results fed into a vision paper and action plan for cooperation up to 2020, which the Group of Funding Parties adopted and presented at the opening of the EU–Russia Year of Science 2014 in Moscow. The thematic priorities were used in the ERA.Net RUS Plus joint call of 2014 (€20 million, 63 funded projects). The transparent and participatory priority setting built trust among the funders, and it was one of the reasons why the Russian Ministry of Education and Science joined the call. The exercise was later used to develop and test an evaluation framework for foresight in transnational research programming (Haegeman et al., 2017), building on earlier work on embedding foresight in such programming (Könnölä & Haegeman, 2012).
ERA.Net RUS ran from February 2009 to January 2014 and was coordinated by the German Aerospace Center (DLR). Project information on CORDIS: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/226164
