Projects

  • Following our last work conducted in 2021 in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation on its Regional Programme Energy Security and Climate Change in Latin America (KAS EKLA), we have the pleasure to share our novel study: “Assessing South American Green Economy Policy Solutions: Emerging from Native Ecosystems".

    After our previous analysis on “The Latin American Atlas of Corporate Sustainability Initiatives” wich — among other things — was able to compare private green economy initiatives from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico to the Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) of such countries, we had identified the need to deepen research on sustainable development in the region, taking into account its socioeconomic, geographic and natural peculiarities.

    Likewise, Assessing South American Green Economy was based on a joint work objecting innovative findings on the economic strategies for mitigation and adaptation to climatic changes, in order to not only contribute to the existing knowledge on Green Economy, but also proposing new perspectives in the identification of paths for the construction of a possible Green New Deal in the Amazon, Andes and Pampas biomes. From this econossystems division, it was possible to systematize each type of development, observing their points in common and the particular needs and potentials of each ecosystem in order to promote a package of political recommendations.

    This study was coordinated by FGV IIU team, but was only possible due to a series of interviews with specialists, researchers, public managers, and legal/public relations representatives of the mapped companies that are present in the report. Additionally, the last was divided in: i. reviewing the existing literature on the topic; ii. mapping the current and future initiatives related to the Green Economy; iii. identifying best practices and innovative ideas; iv. developping a body of knowledge capable of providing policy recommendations for a comprehensive strategy that combines conservation and development to provide subsidies to the next electoral cycle in South American countries.

    Access the full report: Assessing South American Green Economy Policy Solutions: Emerging from Native Ecosystems 

  • The International Intelligence Unit of Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV IIU), in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Foundation, is developing a training project of continuing education for young political actors.
    The object of the project is, through workshops, train people who are new public policy operators in a set of the following strategic tools:

    i. Characteristics and Evaluations of Public Policies
    ii. Interpretation and Statistics, Database and Data Processing
    iii. Mapping and Access to Project Financing
    iv. Emerging Technologies and their Applied Tools

    The workshops will be held in July and August, at FGV's headquarters, according to the file "Workshop Programme and logistics" below.

    >>> The participating students must, at the end of the four workshops, prepare a final project that contemplate the combination of the technical content seen.

  • The FGV IIU in partnership with the Konrad Adenauer Stifftung under its Regional Programme Energy Security and Climate Change in Lantin America, signed a new project aiming to debate the theme of Circular Economy - focusing on building sustainable efficiency from supply.

    As the sustainability challenges are of a global nature, business actors have been continuously pressed by its stakeholders in the last decades. Such pressures also travel through global value chains, thus reaching Latin American producers and consumers as well. These forces represent market and non-market actions, and sustainable behaviors are usually incorporated in corporate knowledge base, internal routines and procedures. Moreover, businesses international movements have been positioning themselves as important amplifiers from these stakeholders’ pressures by reaching other countries. Often, companies chart their way in unregulated areas, and this lack is sometimes filled by companies themselves, which create rules and norms that eventually are absorbed and internalized by countries and institutions.

    Corporate sustainability governance is still a phenomenon in the making. Although there are few examples of global indexes of private sustainability schemes (eg. Ecolabel Index), none of them is particularly dedicated to a better understand of Latin American Businesses Cooperative Actions for Sustainability nor their effects for the region. Against this background, the study ‘Atlas of Latin American Businesses Cooperative Actions for Sustainability: Corporate Institutional Innovation on Sustainability’ will map business initiatives on sustainability in the region, developing measurable indicators and identifying best practices. For that end, our analysis will focus on codes of conduct, private contracting, certification schemes and other methods that can be applied to contracts design, knowledge transfers and/or corporate governance rules in order to disseminate sustainability practices throughout the international business environment.

    Access the Report here:
    The Latin American Atlas of Corporate Sustainable Initiatives

  • The FGV IIU, in partnership with The Korea Foundation, present the “Mercosur-South Korea Trade Agreement: A Framework for an Innovative Proposal”.

    Aware of the transitioning moment that the world economy is going through - in which the global economic axis moves from the North Atlantic to the East Pacific - Mercosur countries are beginning to develop strategies to respond to this new trend. In that sense, building fresh partnerships and enhancing their presence in Eastern production chains should be one of the key elements in the Mercosur approach, implying South Korea and the ASEAN countries as pivotal actors in a more sustainable and robust integration.
    Accordingly, since 2018 the Mercosur bloc and South Korea began the negotiation process for a Trade Agreement. Four rounds of negotiations have occurred so far, and despite the initial optimism regarding a rapid deal, there are, to date, no prospects on its conclusion. Still, the trade agreement initiative was very celebrated in both countries since its announcing: For South Korea, it is a special opportunity for the country to penetrate further into the South America region, where it has only marginally operated. For Mercosur, it is an opportunity to go beyond its previous multilateral strategy and to further internationalize the bloc through a more pragmatic bilateral trade agreement.

    The project's objective is to develop a couple of policy-oriented papers discussing possible strategies and mechanisms for the Agreement. Once finished, its dissemination amidst government officials and decision-makers aims to provide more subsidies to the negotiators. Methodologically, the project embraces two perspectives for analyzing the Mercosur-SK Agreement: Global Value Chains and Regulatory Innovation. Following this division, two Study Groups have been designed, each focusing on a perspective. Both groups will be composed by experts from both South Korea and Mercosur countries.

    Access the Reports here:

    • GVC Working Group Report: Global Value Chains and Implications for the Mercosur-Korea Trade Agreement
    • Regulatory Innovations Working Group Report: Mercosur-South Korea Trade Agreeement: A Framework for an Innovative Proposal

  • The Jean Monnet Atlantic Network 2.0 pursues work that has been conducted for more than five years, under the auspices of the EC. The Atlantic Basin stands as a central arena of globalisation and a microcosm of key global trends. This includes the diffusion and share of power by the two nowadays hegemons -from East and West- and the EU, as a more constructive ally, strengthening good practices and governance modes, instead of only aiming at sheer economic interests: its Atlantic interdependencies must more than ever be deepened.

    With the experience of having participated, as consortium member, of the Atlantic Future Project and, as the network head, in the Jean Monnet Network in Atlantic Studies, successfully concluded in December 2019, FGV IIU co-ordinates this new project that incorporates the lessons from these former ventures. But the Jean Monnet Atlantic Network 2.0 is at the same time a continuation and a rupture with these previous undertakings.

    It is a small network, with six members that keep intense communication and joint activities. Though still tackling themes broadly related to those recently explored -energy and sustainability; trade and related economic issues, from an Atlantic perspective; inequality and its impact on the region’s societies, notably including democracy, social stability and security- emphasis combines a national perspective with the regional one, taking into account the foreign interests and the possible EU roles.

    Rather than the mere pursuit of academic research, active engagement of the Network with policymakers, civil society representatives and the wider public is envisaged. Among varied activities to be part of the deliverables, a main feature is the holding of six meetings, with all network representatives, in which all three themes will be addressed. The meetings are supposed to generate an evolving dialogue, creating externalities in different groups and establishing a follow-up of select main questions, that could act as a threading line along the project. All network members participate, in principle, in all themes, avoiding “idle periods” and “partial commitments” within the network.

    The Network’s balanced EU/non-EU composition ensures greater synergies and exchanges of experience, enhanced by the incorporation of local colours, in order to engage more segments of researchers and society. Dedicated sessions may be held for students and next-generation professionals, as in the previous Networks’ meetings, but, given the new, less academic and more open-debate character of the Project, they can also be directly involved in activities themselves.

     

    Project Website:  https://www.jmatlanticnetwork2.com/

     

  • This project aims to develop a better understanding on the South Korean Best Practices regarding its development model and the formation of its supply chains, in the context of its insertion on the Global Value Chains. The main project objectives are: i. Study the Brazilian insertion on the global market and its supply chains; ii. Develop a body of knowledge that will serve as subsidy for policy and decision makers; and iii. Inform and debate with both the productive and political class on strategies for the Brazilian development, specifically regarding its better integration on the global market and in the global supply chains.

    The project will focus on review and mapping of the existing literature on the South Korean model of development, focusing in its insertion on the global/regional value chain. Although the mapping of the literature is a key part of the understanding process, the project will also seek to interview South Korean experts and practitioners to add a more practical dimension for the research overview.

    Once the research is able to draft a comprehensive picture of the South Korean Benchmark, the project will correlate it with the Brazilian experience and current scenario, in order to extract differences and similarities from both models. This exercise will enable the research team to draw a set of possible best practices from the South Korean experience to inspire and influence the project overall objective of offering a consistent knowledge basis and draft strategy for the Brazilian development.

    This project is the result of a partnership with the Korean Foundation.

     

    Access the Reports here:

    1 - Economic Development and Global Value Chain Insertion: A View from Brazilian and South Korean Lenses

    2 - Perspectives of Global Value Chain Insertion: The Brazilian and South Korean Models

    3 - Global Value Chain, SME, and Policy: Korean Perspective 

    4 - The Importance of the Fourth Industrial Revolution in Global Value Chains

    5 - Brazil, South Korea, and Global Value : A Tale of Two Countries

    6 - Global Value Chain (GVC) and GVC-oriented Policy: Insights from the South Korean Experience

  • The project aims to identify a number of initiatives on the renewable energy sector that  uses emerging technologies to enhance its efficiency and scalability. Those initiatives should have relative  small size, in order to allow them to be replicated or adapted in other contexts, especially small localities/cities. For that, the project will act in three stages.

    The first stage will be the development of a methodology that will allow us to measure the level of “replicability” that a given initiative would have. By that, we mean how adaptable to other contexts a given initiative is. Here we should include variables such as the amount of resources need, technology availability/necessity, level of infrastructure, necessity of specialized labor, regulatory issues, and obstacles to escalate from pilots, etc.

    On the second stage, we will explore for those initiatives. Here we will conduct a broad research to identify and map as many as possible initiatives that use emerging technologies in the renewable energy sector. At this level, we will focus on a small number of countries, namely: Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico1. We expect to identify a diverse array of solutions that could be replicated/adapted. A possible side benefit from this effort is being able to develop a comprehensive view of the landscape of innovation applied to renewable energy sector in the region.

    The third stage consists in the development of the project report. The major objective of the report is to present the initiatives selected in a detailed manner. It should allow other actors, especially in the public sector, from other localities to assess whether they are or not capable to replicate or adapt such initiatives in their own cities. The project works under the assumption that this report could make available some of the most advanced good practices to some smaller and/or isolated municipalities that generally do not have access to vanguard innovations.

    This project is the result of a partnership with the Regional Programme Energy Security and Climate Change in Latin America (EKLA) from the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS).

    Access the Report  here

  • The Jean Monnet Network on Atlantic Studies is an initiative across the four Atlantic continents by 10 leading EU-oriented centres, many with Jean Monnet professors and based in countries identified by the EU as key ”strategic partners,” to collaborate in interdisciplinary exploration of three emerging pan-Atlantic themes of particular relevance to the EU—energy; commercial interactions; and pan-Atlantic challenges to human security. Each activity engage next-generation and established scholars in collaborative research that drive the Network’s engagement with policymakers, civil society representatives, and wider publics. Each incorporate comparative approaches to regional integration. The Network’s balanced North-South composition ensures greater synergies and exchange of experience among established and rising powers. Dedicated sessions was held for next-generation educators. Working papers and peer-reviewed publications are fully accessible open source materials. Data is incorporated into updated visualizations for the online “Atlas of the Atlantic.” The Network position members individually and together as a go-to resource on the contemporary role of the EU in the wider Atlantic space and advance comparative knowledge of regional integration processes in Europe and Atlantic continents.

     

    The Network’s multi-continent, multi-disciplinary approach promises substantial value beyond the state-of-the-art by generating modern understandings of the Atlantic Basin as a political, economic, energy and security space in contemporary international relations, in contrast to its treatment primarily as an object of historical study; incorporating North and South Atlantic perspectives equally on these dynamics; generating greater knowledge and awareness of the EU’s role as an Atlantic actor; and contributing to comparative regionalism by incorporating regional integration processes into each theme. The Network break new ground by studying how energy, commercial dynamics and human security challenges are affecting the Atlantic Basin as a whole; harnessing synergies among leading centres of EU studies across the four Atlantic continents; generating updated online tools for visualizing contemporary Atlantic dynamics and the EU’s role as an Atlantic actor; including young educators in this new frontier for EU studies; and providing policymakers with the basis for new governance approaches. Visible and virtual collaboration raise greater awareness of the EU and its relevance to Atlantic partners on each Atlantic continent.

     

     

    Project Website:   http://jeanmonnetnetwork.com.br/ 

     

     

    Access the books here:

    1 - Energy and Transportation in the Atlantic Basin

    2 - Trade and Commercial Interactions in the Atlantic Basin: Present and Future Issues

    3 - Evolving Human Security Challenges in the Atlantic Space