CRISSI
Start: 2018
End: 2020
The impact of the financial crisis in Southern Europe is the tip of the iceberg that has partly its roots in the international financial crisis, but is also closely linked to the evolutionary dysfunction of the -relatively young- democracies of the European South. The Greek society and economy for instance, face acute symptoms of a long history of degraded civic trust and chronic institutional decay, which magnified the impacts of the financial crisis and led to further loss of trust in democratic institutions.
However, there is growing evidence that the crisis has stimulated segments of civil society to revive paradigms or come up with entirely new solutions based on self-organisation and bottom-up initiatives so as to face social anxiety and frustration and seek for jointly responding to the impacts of austerity. Despite the fact that such paradigms and responses are still under-studied and remain largely a hypothesis, it seems that the crisis has triggered a transition process towards alternative development paths in industry, agriculture and tourism, though in a still fragmented and uncoordinated way.
CRISSI seeks to lay down the foundations (network building and project proposal submission) for deeply understanding these processes and to investigate the prospect for coordinating these actions, assisted by local authorities and societies together with Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). CRISSI focuses on Cyclades islands located in the central Aegean Sea, as the most promising and illustrative case where local responses to the crisis and emerging trends can be identified and experiences can be utilised to develop a research proposal under the societal challenges of HORIZON 2020.
The key objectives of CRISSI are to: i) built up a consortium of partners with complementary competencies and abilities from two countries of the European South (Greece and Spain) and from Germany and ii) develop and submit a research proposal within the HORIZON 2020 priorities.
Researchers: Dr. habil. Dimitrios Zikos
Lead Overall Project: Dr. habil. Dimitrios Zikos, Prof. Dr. Klaus Eisenack
Funding: Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung (BMBF)
Central Achievements: