MATISSE, (Methods and Tools for Integrated Sustainability Assessment) is an Integrated Project within EU-FP-6, Priority Area 1.1.6.3, "Global Change and Ecosystems".

Sustainable development has become an overall policy objective in the European Union. The objective of MATISSE is therefore to achieve a step-wise advance in the science and application of Integrated Sustainability Assessment (ISA) of EU policies. In order to reach this objective the core activity of the MATISSE project is to improve the tool kit available for conducting Integrated Sustainability Assessments.

This is divided into four main project activities:

A common conceptual framework for ISA development, implementation and evaluation will be developed. The framework will be related to the assessment of the current status of ISA and its pattern of use in relation to different domains and contexts. This includes the institutional factors that play a key role at the science-policy interface;

MATISSE will deliver a future tool portfolio for ISA. It will improve and interlink existing tools and methods for ISA with the focus on quantitative tools. In addition, new methods and tools will be developed that capture the multi-domain, multi-level and multi-actor complexity of ISA.

In four case studies the improved and new ISA tools will be applied and tested. The case studies are designed to cover the broad spectrum of domains and contexts of ISA in the EU.

The themes are:

1. agriculture, forestry and land-use,
2. resource use, waste and dematerialisation,
3. water,
4. sustainable environmental technology development.

The involvement and engagement of stakeholders and policy makers will be secured throughout all the activities of the project. Activity four covers the crosscutting capacity-building, communications and outreach tasks. To this purpose, external guidelines for ISA will be developed that will support the future use and application of tools and methods for ISA across a wide range of contexts. The guidelines are also evaluated in the case studies.
The consortium consists of 26 partners, which represent the necessary scope of disciplines and methodologies. They will bring into MATISSE a large set of existing ISA-related methods and tools as well as the experiences from previous key EU projects in this field. Strong participation from the new EU member states is secured. The consortium is lead by the International Centre for Integrative Studies (ICIS) at Maastricht University. The project runs for four years.

Consortium Partners

• International Centre for Integrative Studies, Maastricht University (ICIS) Netherlands
• Tyndall Centre & CSERGE, University of East Anglia, Norwich, (UEA), United Kingdom
• Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency (RIVM), Netherlands
• National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece
• Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), Stockholm, Sweden
• Centre d'Observation Economique of Chambre de Commerce et d'Industrie de Paris, France
• Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, Wuppertal, Germany
• University of Durham, United Kingdom
• Centre for Sustainability Studies, Lund University, Sweden
• IFF-Social Ecology, Vienna, (IFF), Austria
• Inst. of Environmental Science and Technology, A. University of Barcelona, Spain
• Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI), Vienna, Austria
• Cambridge Econometrics, Cambridge, United Kingdom
• Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK), Potsdam, Germany
• International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), Austria
• Société de Mathématiques Appliquées et de Science Humaines (SMASHCIRED), France
• Stockholm Environment Institute Tallinn Centre (SEI-Tallinn), Tallinn, Estonia
• Regional Environmental Center for CEE (REC), Hungary
• Charles University Environmental Center, Prague, Czech Republic
• Fraunhofer Institute Systems and Innovation Research (FhG-ISI), Germany
• SPRU- Science and Technology Policy Research, University of Sussex, Brighton, United Kingdom
• Institute for Sustainable Development, Warsaw, Poland
• Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS), Spain
• Department of Forest Sciences, Agricultural University of Norway, Norway
• Centre de Cooperation Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Developpement (CIRAD), France
• Institute for Structural Policy, The Slovak Republic

Project duration

2005-2008

Project coordinator

International Centre for Integrative Studies (ICIS), the Netherlands
Co-ordinator
Jan Rotmans
E-mail: j.rotmans(at)icis.unimaas.nl

Scientific Officer at EC

Dr. Daniel Deybe, DG RTD
Strategies and Policy for Sustainable
Development Uni

MATISSE contact at LUCSUS

Prof. Lennart Olsson
E-mail: lennart.olsson(at)lucsus.lu.se
Phone: +46 (0)46 222 05 11

More info at

http://www.matisse-project.net