Catalan public university association bridging academic RRI practice and participatory climate governance across European multi-stakeholder projects.
ACUP is the umbrella association representing Catalonia's public universities, giving them a single collective voice on science policy, societal engagement, and European research initiatives. In H2020, they contributed their institutional network and governance expertise rather than laboratory research — facilitating frameworks for how universities engage with society. Their work spans two distinct but related domains: embedding Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) practices into university curricula and institutions, and more recently co-designing participatory climate adaptation strategies with local communities and governments. They are essentially a bridge organization, connecting academic institutions to public policy and societal challenges.
In HEIRRI (2015–2018), ACUP contributed to embedding RRI values — governance, social needs, multi-stakeholder engagement — into university-level education and institutional practice.
HEIRRI involved development of MOOCs, multimedia learning resources, and outreach through science centers and museums, reflecting ACUP's role as a public university network with science-society communication capacity.
TeRRIFICA (2019–2022) positioned ACUP in territorial climate adaptation using living lab and co-creation methodologies with multi-stakeholder processes.
Across both projects ACUP functioned as a participant bringing access to its member universities and their institutional infrastructure rather than delivering primary research outputs.
In their first H2020 project (2015–2018), ACUP focused on how universities can teach and institutionalize Responsible Research and Innovation — with tools like MOOCs, eLearning platforms, and connections to science centers and museums. By their second project (2019–2022), the focus shifted from internal university practice to external territorial action: applying co-creation and multi-stakeholder methods to real-world climate adaptation challenges at the local and regional level. The trajectory is a clear move from science education methodology inward (how universities operate) toward applied societal governance outward (how universities and communities act together on urgent problems).
ACUP is moving from academic framework-building toward applied participatory action on environmental and territorial challenges, suggesting future interest in climate governance, citizen engagement, and place-based sustainability projects.
ACUP has participated exclusively as a consortium partner — never as coordinator — in both of their H2020 projects, suggesting they prefer to contribute their network and facilitation capacity within larger initiatives rather than lead them. Both projects were CSA (Coordination and Support Actions), meaning the consortia themselves were about coordination and dissemination rather than research, pointing to ACUP's natural role as a facilitator and connector. With 15 unique partners across 11 countries from just 2 projects, they bring broad European reach without concentrating on repeat partnerships.
ACUP has connected with 15 distinct consortium partners across 11 European countries in just two projects, suggesting an active and geographically diverse collaboration network despite limited project volume. No repeated partner clusters are visible from the data, indicating openness to new consortium configurations.
ACUP's value in a consortium is not individual research capacity but collective institutional access — as the representative body of all Catalan public universities, they can mobilize multiple universities, their faculties, and their student and alumni networks as a single entry point. This makes them particularly useful for projects requiring broad academic buy-in, multi-institution pilot sites, or dissemination through the Catalan university system. For any project targeting Southern European academic institutions or linking university reform to societal challenges, ACUP offers a ready-made intermediary that combines policy influence with grassroots educational reach.
