CARSI · Caucasus and Central Asia Research on Social Innovation: Development Assistance, Innovation and Societal Transformation

Development assistance to the Caucasus and Central Asian regions has grown significantly. Not only do these regions attract internationalattention for some of the largest world reservoirs of natural resources, but they are also considered fertile markets for their proximity and links to Europe. What possibly distinguishes the EU’s approach from others (i.e. China, India, US) is its interest not only in technical innovation and local market shares but also the regions’ social and human development. This is a major tendency with the EC that has been addressed already as early as 2014, when development strategies started emphasising the importance of taking into account social impacts in its overall development approach. In spite of this declarative intentions by local governments, but even by EU agencies, to introduce social innovation in development and assistance have not been followed through by clear and precise instructions on how to do this. This is visible both at the international and local levels and may be due to: 1) the fact that although a framework for EU-Caucasus-Central Asia relations has significantly advanced, production of specialists and intelligence regarding the regions has not followed accordingly; 2) only a limited amount of intelligence on the region is available.As a response, CARSI is a training and research programme bringing together 16 leading institutions across two continents with a major focus on the Caucasus and Central Asia to train fellows through secondment and eventually produce new empirical evidence on the region. By processing first-hand data and thus identifying the gap between declarative approaches and reality with regards to social innovation CARSI teams will define new relationships between global social innovation approaches and social theory while working to translate research findings into policy recommendations