UiB received supplementary funding for building an epistemic network in Norway on bees, pesticides and precaution

On 17 December 2019, the UiB partner received additional funding from the Norwegian Research Council.
The funding is intended for Norwegian Participants in Horizon 2020 Projects. The purpose of the funding is to increase the impact of Horizon 2020 projects on research, society, and trade and industry in Norway. The UiB team received funding under this call for the project BeeCaution.

The background for the proposal was that the preliminary RECIPES project results showed that the Precautionary Principle is mentioned in many Norwegian legal acts and policy documents, but its use and application are still under-developed. This implies that there is an urgent need for state of the art knowledge on the recent international developments and discourses about the precautionary principle and its relation to innovation and RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation) in Norway.

The funding will be used to establish a network of Norwegian NGOs, interest groups, lawmakers, politicians, science advisers and academics and gather them for co-creation workshops that will both serve as a soundboard and source of knowledge and inspiration, and will be an arena to disseminate, reality-check and quality control RECIPES results. We will focus on the RECIPES case study on neonicotinoid pesticides. The co-creation workshops will give a wide range of relevant Norwegian actors access to state of art knowledge developed in our H2020 project through two-way engagement and dissemination at workshops and by translating the RECIPES Policy Briefs and key documents into Norwegian.

Part of the extra funding will be used to extend the RECIPES media analysis on the precautionary principle with Norwegian newspapers, increasing the relevance of the RECIPES project in Norway.

All in all, the supplementary funding will increase the impact, relevance, and applicability of the RECIPES results in Norway both when it comes to policy advice, further research, society, public understanding of the bees and pesticides controversy, and stakeholders in trade and industry.