The Collaboration Compass (COCO) consortium has reached an important milestone by organising a series of Deliberative Mini-Publics in Italy, Poland, and Denmark. These sessions brought together participants from higher education institutions and civil society organisations to discuss the barriers and opportunities for collaboration, marking a significant step toward COCO’s broader goal of strengthening understanding and cooperation between higher education institutions (HEIs) and civil society organizations (NGOs/CSOs) to address social and environmental challenges through innovative, interdisciplinary collaboration.
COCO’s newly developed Guidelines for Conducting Deliberative Mini-Publics were used to guide the discussions around a question central to the COCO project: “What is actually getting in the way of sustained collaboration between universities and civil society?” ACEEU played a key role in shaping the quality of the COCO Guidelines for the DMP.
In total, more than 40 participants, including representatives from universities, civil society organizations, local institutions, and student communities, joined the three sessions at the University of Camerino (Italy), Adam Mickiewicz University (Poznań), and Aalborg University (Copenhagen), in collaboration with byStudents. Across all DMP sessions, a shared methodology based on the World Café format was used, following the instructions in the COCO Guidelines for Conducting DMP.
Important highlights from the DMP sessions at Camerino and Copenhagen showed that the main challenges to collaboration are not a lack of willingness, but structural differences between the institutions involved. Participants reported issues such as differing timelines, limited resources, and varying expectations between universities and civil society actors.
Notably, the session in Copenhagen drew attention to the position of students as potential bridges between HEIs and CSOs, while academic pressure and a lack of incentives could represent important challenges to their long-term engagement.
The insights from the sessions will be included in a summary report, which will contribute directly to the COCO Awareness Guide developed by ACEEU, supporting COCO’s broader goal of strengthening understanding and co-operation between higher education institutions (HEIs) and civil society organizations (CSOs).
COCO’s Guidelines for Deliberative Mini-Publics are now publicly available here as a practical resource for facilitation teams, including those with little or no prior experience of deliberative methods. This work marks an important step in COCO’s efforts to build stronger and more sustainable collaboration between higher education and civil society.
Read more about the COCO project here.
