ENHANCE objectives and methodology

ENHANCE defined four objectives:

1. To identify indicators of successful and unsuccessful partnerships, and ways to foster new multi-sector partnerships (MSPs).
2. To develop harmonised methods and scenarios for assessing risk, especially the risk of low-probability events.
3. To test which economic instruments, insurance arrangements and policies work for multi-sector partnerships.
4. To produce guidelines and policy recommendations for integrating risk management and climate-proofing across policy areas.

The method centred on participation. New partnerships were not designed at a desk and then handed to stakeholders; they were developed through participatory processes with the people who would run them. The project was organised around a work package of ten participatory case studies at different scales across Europe, from a single municipality in Portugal to EU-wide instruments such as the Solidarity Fund.

The project’s original statement of aims listed the hazards it would cover: heat waves, forest fires, floods, drought, storm surge and volcanic eruptions. All six are represented in the case studies.

Each objective can be traced to a body of work. The partnership indicators and guidance appear in reports such as D2.4 and D7.2. The risk assessment methods appear in D2.1 and D3.1. The economic and insurance instruments were the subject of D5.1, D5.2 and D5.3. The policy recommendations fed into the Sendai Framework and the European Commission’s Green Paper process. The cases themselves are in the case-study atlas.