Case Studies Atlas of Local Sustainability Transition (CASTAL)
Project funded by OSCARS project in the framework of the Horizon Europe Programme
Grant Agreement 101129751
Duration: 24 months
Start date: 01/10/2024
OSCARS project official website
Over the last 25 years, the European Union has been committed to making its cities and local communities more sustainable. Indeed, European communities, cities and regions have engaged in Local Sustainability Transition (LST), making the EU a laboratory for sustainable solutions, including the socio-technical aspects of transition. LST has been extensively studied by European SSH researchers, experts, and practitioners, using “the case study” as a privileged tool for investigating context-specific transitions towards environmentally sustainable socio-technical systems. However, despite producing a massive corpus of knowledge on LST in Europe, there are still several difficulties in the real exploitation of such knowledge for further research purposes. Among them it is worth mentioning: the fragmentation of knowledge and data; the lack of archives to store and preserve knowledge and data produced; the lack of sufficient attempts to organise data collected and knowledge produced across cases; the difficulty of cumulating data on the same cases from different studies.
In this context, the overall objective of the project is developing a “Case Studies Atlas of Local Sustainability Transition – CASTAL”, i.e. a new digital research tool collecting case studies (mainly licensed in “CC by”) and making them Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable (FAIR), thus contributing to Open Science and EOSC, by enabling future research and the exploitation of research results by researchers from SSH and other disciplines, and from local authorities, businesses and citizens.
The project is funded within cascading funding launched by OSCARS, a Horizon Europe Grant (GA 101129751) and developed by two third-party organisations, K&I (Knowledge & Innovation) and UNIMIB (University of Milan–Bicocca). K&I is the coordinator. UNIMIB through DASSI (Data for Social Science in Italy) is in charge of data curation. DASSI is the Italian national service provider for the European Infrastructure CESSDA ERIC (Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives).
The CASTAL Project will provide an archive, collecting 500+ case studies; a metadata dataset describing each case study; and a web portal as a companion tool for increasing the accessibility and findability of the Atlas. The project will also promote secondary studies using CASTAL as a data source and develop web services and guidelines for updating the Atlas.
The project is supported by 11 European organisations, including universities and research institutes, networks of academic institutions, cities, regions and communities (over 20 relevant projects), that have expressed their interest in the results of CASTAL.