The first meeting of the IECEU-project Advisory Board is taking place in Brussels today. Advisory Board consists of prominent experts, working in the field of civilian crisis management, peacebuilding, post-conflict stabilisation, policy or humanitarian tasks and in different organisations, such as EEAS, academic institutions, NGOs and others. The IECEU project is set to analyse and evaluate best practices and lessons learned with a view to enhance the civilian conflict prevention and peacebuilding capabilities of the European Union (EU). The miscellaneous expertise of the representatives of the Advisory Board will validate the conceptual framework of the project and its results as well as contribute to the high-level dissemination for all relevant information end-users.
The activities of the project are based on co-creative methods, good quality of coordination and support activities such as analysing, dissemination, training sessions, workshops and the final conference. To achieve the set goals, project aims to strengthen cooperation between different actors in the operational context. Advisory Board will be included in all important phases in order to provide useful guidance to assess the comparative analysis and a catalogue of best practices and lessons learned as well as to support with implementation of them in the practice.
The project started on May 1 2015 and consists of nine working packages, each with different objective in the scope of 33 months. The project recently successfully completed the first package of deliverables, which will provide the consortium with an up-to-date review documents for better understanding of the framework and definitions of the EU external action, civilian and military as well as existing practices in terms of pooling and sharing of capabilities. The deliverables serve as a useful basis for future research, the most important of them is the collaboratively created conceptual framework, which is to be reviewed by the Advisory Board for validity and applicability. The next three working packages are to follow simultaneously, with field visits to three regions planned in spring 2016 in order to analyse the effectiveness of the EU in the Balkans, Africa, Middle East and Asia.
