The 2018 Training School on “Collaborative local government for an open society” is one of the long-lasting series of summer courses for Ph.D. students interested in local government issues. It is co-organized by the European Urban Research Association and Standing Group for Local Government and Politics of ECPR, and gives an opportunity to develop the understanding of comparative local government studies in Europe and to discuss Ph.D. dissertation with experienced professors of different disciplines and coming from different countries.

With the recent adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the call by UN Secretary General for a “revolution” in the use of data for sustainable development, geospatial technologies have tremendous potential to effectively and efficiently monitor SDG progress. In the fifteen years since the adoption of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the amount of data available, as well as data collection and processing methods have changed substantially.

This intensive one-week course facilitates the exchange of ideas and cooperative projects among mediation scholars, practitioners, trainers, and students in the East and West. In addition to offering an introduction to mediation, the program provides a teaching and training template for mediation training for scholars and practitioners from around the world to adapt for use in their home countries.
 

The introduction of lifelong learning (LLL) in European universities has been discussed extensively at policy level since early 2000 in various contexts and with different arguments. Among others the arguments of the so-called knowledge society and its need for a qualified workforce, the European demographics and the extended university's mission have all been invoked to highlight the importance of lifelong learning and the role played by universities in helping communities and individuals to meet professional and societal challenges.

The purpose of the course is to acquaint course participants with recent work on the history and metaphysics of the concept of scientific law and related concepts that are central to the development and understanding of science. These concepts are important to philosophical accounts of both science and to metaphysics. While there has been a great deal of active research on writing on the metaphysics of laws and also on the history of the concept of laws there has been little interaction between researchers involved in each project.

The precautionary principle is a key principle of environment governance. It poses challenges to both environmental science and environmental governance because it applies to 'situations of scientific complexity, uncertainty and ignorance, where there may be a need to act in order to avoid, or reduce, potentially serious or irreversible threats to health and/or the environment, using an appropriate strength of scientific evidence, and taking into account the pros and cons of action and inaction and their distribution' (EEA 2013, p. 681).