The HIGHLANDS’ goal is to contribute to Inclusive Sustainable Development in Highlands (ISDH) through collective and
impact-driven Research & Innovation (R&I), based on capacity building, sharing of local-global knowledge, experience, and
tools. It will drive a co-innovation process through secondments and research and innovative sessions (R&IS) involving
public/private and non-academic partners, to build a shared vision of ISDH, enhance the capacities of researchers,
managers, users, policymakers, thus bridging the gap between research and development. Our activities will be organized in
5 integrated work packages (WP): Coordination & management (WP1); Methodology & capacity building for ISDH (WP2);
Analysis, comparison and modelling of ISDH (WP3); Building a multi-actor ISDH Decision-Support Platform (DSP) (WP4);
Communication, Dissemination & Exploitation of results (WP5). HIGHLANDS is supported by a network of 43 institutions
including 31 partners from Europe (~35% non-academic), and skilled and motivated female and male researchers and local
stakeholders. The work plan will run 8 successive R&IS (5 in Europe, 3 outside) to promote the exchange among
participants as a foundation for innovation. Each R&IS will build upon collective learning principles and a holistic systemic
approach, exposing participants to a wide range of world views that will encourage experimentation with practice. Each R&IS
will focus on a particular aspect of sustainable highland development and will include collective learning, collaborative
research, and capacity-building on data collection/analysis, modeling. To complement the R&IS, long-term secondments will
be implemented for researchers and practitioners to deeply train and work together on specific issues identified by the
consortium. Collected data on ISDHs will be stored in an online collaborative and interactive decision-support platform that
will then be transferred to existing mountain networks.
