Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade (SMART)

The project, led by professor Beate Sjåfjell, University of Oslo, is entitled Sustainable Market Actors for Responsible Trade (SMART), and a funding application was submitted to the EU Framework Programme for Research and Innovation Horizon 2020 in May 2015. In October 2015, we received the fantastic news that the consortium, under the leadership of Beate Sjåfjell, is successful, and that the EU Commission has invited us to the grant agreement preparation phase. The plan is to start up the SMART Project early 2016 and this site will then link to a new SMART website.
SMART responds to the Horizon 2020 call: ‘The European Union's contribution to global development: in search of greater policy coherence for development’ (INT-04-2015). The Project lies within the Policy Coherence for Development (PCD) challenge of trade and finance. By situating this in the broader context of sustainable development and integrating the state-of-the art natural science concept of planetary boundaries into our research, our work will also have relevance for the global PCD challenges of climate change and indirectly for the global food security, migration and security challenge.
The thematic scope of SMART centres on products originating wholly or in part in developing countries and sold by businesses in the EU to consumers and procurers in the EU. Compared to the Sustainable Companies Project, SMART will broaden the scope of the analysis to include the social dimension of sustainability as well as the environmental, and focuses more broadly on business, investors and consumers as well as the state as market actor and regulator.
SMART intends to deliver state-of-the-art insights beyond current PCD research by investigating the drivers of sustainable business through integrated research into the market actors across the whole global value chain. This will deliver practical tools and innovative regulatory reform proposals with significant potential for greater PCD as an integral part of the shift towards sustainability.