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Sustainable Methods for Adapting and Adopting Regional Technologies (SMAART)

The European Union Center at the University of Illinois has been awarded its third Jean Monnet Center of Excellence grant under the Erasmus+ program of the European Commission, for the period of April 2022-March 2025. The project supported by this grant, Sustainable Methods for Adapting and Adopting Regional Technologies (SMAART), focuses on the identification of best practices to encourage democratic interaction and adoption of new technologies among marginalized communities, urban and rural. By focusing on the European Green Deal and its policy and comparable initiatives by the U.S. federal government, SMAART aims at increasing the interest and collaboration between American and European scholars on questions of inequality, accessibility and sustainability. The premise of the proposal is that, both in the EU and the US, social groups more affected by the unequal distribution of resources are more likely to be hostile to the technological and economic transformations of a new, green economy. The goal is to identify best practices for how economic innovation and sustainability can be driven by processes “from below,” rather than just by initiatives of federal institutions, and increase marginalized communities’ political trust in a green, sustainable economy.

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Please direct any questions about this project to EU Center Director Emanuel Rota at rota@illinois.edu.