FRINGE Centre blog series: I for Informality
By tjmsubl, on 9 February 2016
In our latest FRINGE Centre blog, Eric Gordy of UCL SSEES and the FRINGE Centre considers informality in the Balkans – the focus of a major new project ‘Closing the Gap between Formal and Informal Institutions in the Balkans’, which recently received a 2.4 million euros from the Horizon 2020 programme, and which is being led by Eric from UCL SSEES.
The research project on which we are now working came to life in a bar in Belgrade. I had arranged to meet my colleague in Serbia, Predrag Cvetičanin, to discuss an offer we had received to propose a work package for a Horizon 2020 proposal that was being assembled by our colleagues in economics. After looking at the general framework we decided that being the “social science on-the-side” team for a project in another discipline did not interest us, and that we would decline the offer. And probably because a few drinks had made us foolhardy, we decided that we would put together a proposal of our own (“What’s the success rate, 9%? Great!”).