The EU has the largest global maritime space with its sea basins and oceans. Their variety and complementarity offer a vast potential to develop offshore renewable energy, which can be harnessed in a sustainable way, complementing other activities, including defence. However, there are certain barriers to using renewable energy sources, as large areas are reserved for the civil and military sectors at a national level. The defence sector is reluctant to release the maritime areas reserved for military purposes due to concerns on possible impacts on the operational effectiveness of the armed forces. Consequently, when allocating maritime space for offshore energy exploitation, the responsible national authorities should establish a dialogue with the defence community to develop an understanding of their requirements and plans to foster coexistence. To address these concerns and deliver sustainable solutions, EDA, together with the European Commission, will develop the project “SYMBIOSIS-Offshore Renewable Energy for Defence”, aiming at enabling mutually beneficial coexistence between different entities that depend on each other. Run by the Project Management Team and supported by an Advisory Board, the SYMBIOSIS project will establish two communities of users, a defence and a civilian one. Bringing together these communities will enable deepening their insights into the barriers for deploying offshore renewables in maritime defence space and creating synergies for addressing them. Hence, the SYMBIOSIS project will map the maritime defence areas, assess their suitability for deploying offshore renewable projects and analyse the hurdles and risks constraining their development and exploitation. Through research, simulation-modelling, and evaluation-testing in the European maritime spaces, the project will develop different regulatory, technological, and operational solutions and alternatives to address concerns and needs.

The objective of this proposal is to explore through the engagement of experts from the energy and defence sectors, the benefits that could be enabled in support of the European Commission’s implementation of the Energy Efficiency Directive (EED), Renewable Energy Directive (RED), and Energy Performance of Buildings Directive (EPBD). Moreover the objective is further enhanced by its orientation to support the EU efforts for sustainability in line with prevailing policy and regulatory framework. This proposal is highly relevant to the work programme given that the focus of the work will be on: i. Energy Management, ii. Energy Efficiency, iii. Renewable Energy Resources, and iv. the Protection of Critical Energy Infrastructure. The deliverables of CF SEDSS II will also have the potential to generate relevant projects that could be possibly funded by the EC’s related and applicable funding instruments according to the legislative and administrative rules in force at that time. EDA will build on its experience in capability development, research and innovation, project management and consensus building with specific regard to the two core themes of the Consultation Forum. The work will be conducted under the umbrella of EDA’s Energy and Environment programme, using, where possible, existing studies and networks to deliver quality products in the shortest possible time. The concrete multi-stakeholder work to be implemented, becomes increasingly relevant given that the scope of work will include identification, relation with and impact on wider EU policies, identifications of existing or missing relevant innovative funding instruments in the context of energy in the defence and security sector.

To address the emerging and future challenges in the field of energy as well as to meet the expectations of the Council of the European Union (EU), and consequently of the EU Ministries of Defence (MoDs), the Consultation Forum for Sustainable Energy in the Defence and Security Sector (CF SEDSS) will continue pursuing in Phase III the implementation of the EU legal framework on energy and will reaffirm the Consultation Forum as an appropriate vehicle for sharing information and best practices on improving energy management, energy efficiency, the use of renewable energy by the defence sector as well increasing the protection and resilience of defence energy-related critical energy infrastructures. Building on the achievements of the previous phases (CF SEDSS phase I and II), the European Defence Agency (EDA) with the support of the European Commission (Directorate General Energy -DG ENER and Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises - EASME), looks forward to continuing assisting the MoDs to move towards more affordable, greener, sustainable and secure energy models. In this context, Phase III will contribute in preparing the defence sector to welcome and accommodate new trends in technology and to address challenges ranging from technical and human factors to hybrid threats and other risks. Overall, Phase III is expected to present the defence and security sectors with an economic, operational, and strategic opportunity to reduce reliance on fossil fuel and natural gas, to progressively minimise energy costs and carbon footprint and to enhance the operational effectiveness and energy resilience of their functions.

Pirates are back on the agenda of world politics. How is the international community responding to piracy and what makes it so difficult to address the problem? This project analyses the international response to contemporary maritime piracy. Notably in response to Somali piracy a wide variety of actors has become engaged in counter-piracy since 2008. Actors include the UN Security Council, the NATO, the EU, the International Maritime Organization (IMO), but also various national and regional security and development actors. Together a complex set of new institutions and fora has been put in place, leading to unique web of relations that this project describes as a "global security governance arrangement under construction". In the project I want to understand how this arrangement works, why and when it succeeds and fails. To do so I conduct the first major systematic analysis of this arrangement from a political science perspective. To understand the arrangement illuminates and hopefully improves policy making in the domain of counter-piracy and maritime security. Yet, the type of analysis developed in the study has also implications that go beyond the immediate case of counter-piracy. I draw on and further develop theoretically and methodologically a perspective that is relatively recent to political science and international relations. It has been introduced as a "practice turn" or as "international practice theory". This perspective focuses on practice as the core unit of analysis. In the project I draw on practice theory and use praxiographic methodology centered on a strategy of zooming in and zooming out. In three research phases I investigate four counter-piracy governance processes in depth (zooming in) as well as the relations between actors and sites (zooming out). I conduct in-depth studies of counter-piracy governance on an international level by studying the UN Contact Group, and on a regional level by investigating initiatives in East Asia, Eastern and Western Africa. The analysis then is a major contribution to the research agendas of International Relations in at least three ways. 1) The project develops an innovative eclectic analytical framework to interrogate security governance arrangements. It is an eclectic framework since it aims "to demonstrate the practical relevance of, and substantive connections among theories and narratives constructed within seemingly discrete and irreconcilable approaches" (Sil and Katzenstein 2010:3). I combine different approaches to security often understood as mutually exclusive. I do so in relying on a practice-theoretical approach that has the capacity to combine these. The project develops an innovative framework and advances the debates about what can be achieved with practice theory. 2) The analysis is important for the debates in security studies on how contemporary threats are governed. A vibrant agenda around the framework of securitisation theory has approached the construction processes of threats, such as transnational organized crime or HIV/Aids. On the one side the project adds the securitisation of piracy to the discussion. But it also extends the discussions in two major ways. It fills a blind spot of a current agenda that concentrates on representations and constructions. A focus on practice helps to also pay attention to the practical consequences for actions such as the use of force. The focus on practice also widens the understanding of problem construction in situating securitisation among a range of other problematisations (such as an economic or a humanitarian one). 3) The project is of immediate relevance for the emerging inter-disciplinary field of piracy studies. Much of piracy studies are exclusively policy-oriented. Others focus on the behavior of pirates or on the "root causes" of piracy. The project intervenes in piracy studies in demonstrating that is important to also pay attention to the broader implications of piracy.

The ENTRUSTED consortium proposes to establish a Network of Users for governmental Satellite Communications, with the aim to achieve a reliable collaboration and coordination between them to eventually agree on common user needs and requirements, to share information about existing and planned future SatCom capabilities and to have a framework to establish symbiotic relationships when beneficial for the partners. The main project's results will be a consolidated set of institutional EU user requirements for secure SatCom services and a long-term Roadmap and Coordination plan for research and innovation activities related to the user technologies, to serve as reference guidelines for the future user related activities and pave the way for a potential future EU GOVSATCOM programme.