The Mediterranean library of knowledge
Explore the ENI CBC Med Programme's library of deliverables: a comprehensive digital repository of diverse resources tailored for the Mediterranean region. Discover in-depth studies, innovative strategies, and practical tools spanning tools addressing key environmental, economic, and social issues. The library is your go-to source to find valuable knowledge to inspire new collaborative projects driving fair, sustainable and inclusive development across the Mediterranean.
MedRiSSE Comparative Report and Analysis on co-production and public sector innovation
An in-depth comparative report and analysis on co-production and public sector innovation was completed, providing a comprehensive understanding of the social innovation elements of the 5 capitalised projects. The objective was to gain a broad understanding of how social innovation in the 5 projects was tackled and what the main issues and priorities to be considered for policy purposes are. Several focus groups and interviews/surveys with 5 project teams were organized to define the concept of social innovation and its impact in target countries.
MedRiSSE Innovation Credit System
Asanblea de Cooperación por la Paz (ACPP) and the Palestinian Agricultural Coooperatives Association (PARC) , with the help of experts, developed a system of innovation credits to encourage consultation of relevant SSE actors by public services. The Innovation Tokens in the Social Policy Co-Production Lab provide a variety of ways for users to engage with the Lab, from incentivizing collaboration to rewarding contributions and recognizing status. These tokens can be used to access exclusive content, services, and rewards. Innovation Tokens provide a powerful mechanism for distributing resources and incentivizing desired behaviors within a community of practice.
MedRiSSE Wiki User Handbook
A Wiki User Handbook was developed for the MedRiSsE online learning repository, serving as a valuable resource for innovators, researchers, and policymakers to enhance their co-production skills. This repository is collectively managed by the WCoP, ensuring relevant and timely updates. It facilitated the dissemination of knowledge generated by the 5 capitalized projects such as the eLearning courses, the replicability roadmaps, and the policy briefs.
MedRiSSE Policy briefs in promoting social innovation led by SSE entities
Oxfam Italy, based on a cross-country analysis, constructed 5 thematic policy briefs targeting key topics in social innovation. These topics were chosen for their relevance to broader public debate and the potential to be leveraged at a country level. The themes include: promoting the role of Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) in developing the green economy in Jordan; pragmatic options for social enterprises to access blended finance mechanisms in Italy; advancing local currencies and removing implementation barriers in Spain; financial support for women-led cooperatives, contributing to women empowerment in Palestine; and enhancing cooperation between higher education, social entrepreneurs, and the SSE sphere in Tunisia’s educational system. The briefs were developed in collaboration with regional focal points and a consultant, validated through a restitution meeting, and disseminated via both offline workshops and online webinars. These briefs offer detailed and specific actions and recommendations for policy makers to effectively promote social innovation.
MedRiSSE Replication Toolkit
The MedRiSSE Replication Toolkit was developed by ARCO/PIN S.c.r.l. to provide an easy to read and practitioners-oriented toolkit aiming to inspire and provide guiding elements for SSE actors in the public and private sectors wishing to replicate public-private co-production models and SSE good practices.
MedRiSSE Replication Roadmaps for replicability on Social Innovation practices
ARCO/PIN S.c.r.l., Italian partner of MedRiSSE, conducted a literature review on replicability tools and frameworks assessing scalability of social innovation initiatives. This guided the evaluation of the replication and scalability potential of 5 good practices from the MEDRiSSE project. The framework is based on the Sustainable Human Development paradigm and the Capability Approach perspective, viewing the Social and Solidarity Economy from a territorial ecosystem perspective. It also considers contextual factors. This exchange of knowledge and experience resulted in five replicability roadmaps and a toolkit to guide potential replication of social innovation models.
MedRiSSE E-Learning Courses on Co-production and Social Innovation with SSE entities
These courses result from the knowledge and experience gained from five capitalized projects funded by the ENI CBC MED Programme. All projects aimed to enhance a collaborative ecosystem for Social Solidarity Economy (SSE) initiatives, support social business startups, and promote social innovation. In total, 5 eLearning courses have been developed and uploaded to the Med Co-production Lab: Co-production of Public Policies and Complementary Currencies, Alliances with SSE for Employment and Education, Support to Social Business Start-ups on Scaling up and Replication, Fair Trade, Rural Entrepreneurship and Women's Empowerment, and How to Develop a Local Ecosystem of SSE Based on CITESS Methodology. Once the course is successfully completed after a quick quiz, the Lab automatically generates a certificate of knowledge. All courses have been translated to Arabic and Spanish.
AQUACYCLE My Autobiography - Part 2 Exceeding on expectations
The manuscript “AQUACYCLE My Autobiography” brings an account of the project’s journey through the ‘eyes’ of the project’s eco-innovative wastewater treatment system.
It is foremost intended to share the project’s aims and objectives and the progress towards achieving these objectives in an easy-to-understand manner. It is hoped that readers, including society at large will thus gain access into the functioning and purpose of the components that make up the treatment system: an anaerobic digester, one or more constructed wetlands and a solar raceway pond reactor.
Along the project’s journey, AQUACYCLE meets up not only with his ‘creators’, i.e. the research teams in the ENI CBC Med funded project but also with water stakeholders, including farmers from around the Mediterranean Region who are alerting to the dire water situation they are facing and how junior high school students amaze their teachers with their intimate knowledge also of EU regulations concerning treated wastewater reuse and more.
This second tome, published in October 2023 brings the sequel to My Autobiography: Anxiously waiting to make my physical appearance, published in February 2022. The latter collects the chapters prior to the construction of a first pilot demonstration unit of the treatment system in Spain, hence the title ‘Anxiously waiting to make my physical appearance’.
In this sequel, the reader is informed how the project reached all of its originally foreseen objectives ... and much more ! ... hence the title ‘Exceeding on expectations’.
AQUACYCLE My Autobiography - Part 1 Anxiously waiting to make my physical appearance
The manuscript “AQUACYCLE My Autobiography” brings an account of the project’s journey through the ‘eyes’ of the project’s eco-innovative wastewater treatment system.
It is foremost intended to share the project’s aims and objectives and the progress towards achieving these objectives in an easy-to-understand manner. It is hoped that readers, including society at large will thus gain access into the functioning and purpose of the components that make up the treatment system: an anaerobic digester, one or more constructed wetlands and a solar raceway pond reactor.
Along the project’s journey, AQUACYCLE meets up not only with his ‘creators’, i.e. the research teams in the ENI CBC Med funded project but also with water stakeholders, including farmers from around the Mediterranean Region who are alerting to the dire water situation they are facing.
This first tome, published in February 2022 collects the chapters prior to the construction of a first pilot demonstration unit of the treatment system in Spain, hence the title ‘Anxiously waiting to make my physical appearance’.
AQUACYCLE Capitalization Plan
The AQUACYCLE Capitalization Plan takes stock of the ENI CBC Med funded project’s achievements from two complementary perspectives.
The first chapter collects the Project Legacies – which have been aggregated under no less than 10 different headers – together with the targeted recipients and informs on how public access to these legacies will be ensured beyond the project lifetime. Consequently, further details are presented on each of these respective project legacies.
The second chapter informs about the project’s Capacity Building Achievements, the recipients and the quantified targets reached in terms of the number of Certified APOC users, i.e. the number of persons who received training of the project’s eco-innovative wastewater treatment system, abbreviated to APOC system; the number of tertiary degree awards to women in Tunisia for their research related to the project’s eco-innovative wastewater treatment system, and a multitude of women researchers who have been highly instrumental in the successful outcomes of the project’s research activities and for making the outcomes accessible to a wider public, including society at large.
The final, third chapter reiterates on the Project Key Performance Indicators, which sustains the subtitle of the second volume of AQUACYCLE My Autobiography: Exceeding on Expectations.
AQUACYCLE In-depth analysis of local water and sanitation governance framework
The present document brings the analysis of the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT) of the local Governance Framework in the three countries where pilot demonstration units of the project’s eco-innovative wastewater treatment system have been constructed, i.e. Lebanon, Spain and Tunisia.
The first chapter places the scope of the present SWOT analysis in the context of the overall aim and the specific objectives of ‘Preparing for participatory decision-making’.
Chapter 2 elaborates briefly on the rationale for the SWOT analysis to be based on a desk review of available reports and assessment studies and interviews with representatives of the public authorities involved at the national, regional and local level. This is followed by a detailed description of the roles and involvement of the main stakeholders’ groups in Chapter 3, while Chapter 4 brings an overview of the regulatory framework for sanitation, wastewater treatment and reuse in agriculture in the respective countries. Chapter 5 informs on the semi-structured questionnaire that was elaborated for the purpose of interviewing the main stakeholders in each country and reports on the outcomes of the 15 stakeholder interviews that were conducted.
Chapter 6 presents the outcomes of the SWOT analysis of the eco-innovative wastewater treatment technology brought by AQUACYCLE, (for technical details on the technology see Output APOC technical guide). In turn, these outcomes provided a solid basis for the elaboration in Chapter 7 of forward looking strategies for the Mediterranean Region as a whole and for the targeted case study countries in particular. Finally, overall conclusions and recommendations are provided in Chapter 8.
AQUACYCLE Technical guide on project's eco-innovative wastewater treatment system
This technical guide has been designed to provide guidance to staff of public and private entities needing info on the project’s eco-innovative wastewater treatment system (abbreviated to APOC system) design, operation and maintenance.
The acronym APOC stands for “Anaerobic digestion”, “Photocatalytic Oxidation” and “Constructed wetland”, the three components of the eco-innovative wastewater treatment system promoted by the AQUACYCLE project. Anaerobic treatment and constructed wetlands are two mature and commercialized technologies with wide applications in the wastewater treatment market, that are combined with a novel solar disinfection/photocatalytic oxidation process towards the treatment of municipal wastewater at a level that satisfies the most stringent standards for reuse. The distinctive features of APOC technology make it eco-friendly, efficient and cost-effective as it is based on natural systems, it uses less chemicals, runs on renewable energy (solar irradiation), produces biogas, fertiliser and a clean water for reuse in agriculture, in domestic, industrial or other applications, and the constructed wetland thrives as a habitant, an ecological tourist attraction aside from being a climate change mitigation measure.
This guide has been prepared by a cross-border multidisciplinary scientific interaction. Specifically, AQUACYCLE partners which hold expertise in the three different components of the APOC system have provided the necessary technical information and data sheets for the scope of this manual.