Structure of the Policy Leader Fellowship

The fellows are offered full access to the Florence STG and the EUI: accessing the premises, attending events, workshops, seminars as well as making full use of the EUI Library and its resources in order to carry out research work related to their projects.

All fellowship activities aim to broaden fellows’ horizons beyond their own field of expertise and to empower them with skills, models, and tools.

Tailored professional skills workshops are organized specifically for the fellows as well as small-group bespoke sessions with leading policy-makers and academics. Furthermore, the fellows can participate in executive trainings based on the fellows’ interest and area of specialisation.

As an opportunity to enhance leadership and interpersonal skills, fellows embark on a mentorship journey with students of the Master in Transnational Governance programme. This initiative fosters a two-way partnership for mutual learning, valuing diverse perspectives and focusing on the professional growth and development of the next generation of change-makers entering the job market.

The fellows receive a monthly grant and can qualify for additional family and/or partner allowances.

The fellows are expected to be active members of the STG community. They reside in Florence for the duration of the programme and are regularly present at the school. The programme is fellow-driven and strong emphasis is given to peer-to-peer learning.

During their time at the Florence STG, the fellows challenge the state of play, develop policy recommendations and practical solutions for pressing issues of transnational relevance. Fellows lead on STG Talks, provide case studies to the STG master's programme, contribute to the STG Policy Papers and other publications.

Fellows are independent and self-motivated. They are responsible for autonomously completing their workplan during the fellowship time and present their progress and results during the programme.

Policy learning refers to a relatively stable change in beliefs about public policy. This can happen because of new evidence, lessons provided by other countries, and social interaction. However, today the space for policy learning is constrained by emotional politics, the denial of expertise, and the attack on independent regulators, experts, and scientists. Fast-burning crises also alter the relatively slow process of learning from evidence-based policy instruments. Social learning requires citizens who reflect critically on their prior assumptions about public policy and are open to reasoned argumentation.

Where is the space for learning from evidence, reasonable arguments, and data in transnational governance? Fellows are encouraged to explore this space with their project, connecting with research underway at the STG and the EUI on evidence & policy, emotions and public policy, and policy instruments.

Led by Professor Claudio Radaelli

Mediation and negotiation solve conflicts within and between nations. Their theory, pedagogy and practice however face knowledge gaps which various operational models can explore:

• Instinctive model – Hard bargainers, like populists, exhibit positional, hostile, zero-sum, and transactional behaviours. Trump’s Art of the Deal popularises this “business” model, which grows in domestic and international politics, with Trump as US president. “Coercive diplomacy” leverages “hard power” dynamics, with a rhetoric boosting emotions.
• Rationalised model – Beyond instinct, “win/win” negotiation practices gained conceptual structuring. Global experts trained in Harvard methods mainstream “soft power,” at the EU or the UN. This model faces a historical backlash as the instinctive model returns in force.
• Responsible model – Instinct and misused digital tools shake “rationalised” negotiating. Professionals need resilient methods to reconcile empathy with rationality, relativise rational claims, rationalise disrupters, reclaim AI, and regain legitimacy with decentering strategies.
  
  

Fellows are encouraged to connect their project to these models and other research underway at the STG and EUI. Through their collaboration, faculty and fellows can contribute to applied innovative research, updated training tools, and operational policy frameworks to revisit Europe, democracy and 21^st century crises.

Led by Professor Alain Lempereur

The world is currently in a state of flux as the international system is transforming amidst a turbulent geopolitical environment characterised by disorder and uncertainty. How can policymakers navigate in the new and emerging environment and what possibilities exist for transnational governance in response to the many crises and policy challenges facing us? The project will focus on understanding the history, current nature, and potential future trajectories of global order(s), aiming to examine the diverse and often contested understandings of orders and disorder. The project will focus on transnational governance within and between international orders.

Fellows are encouraged to engage in creative thinking to generate new understandings about order and disorder within their field of research and to investigate specific scenarios for policy and transnational governance in a disorderly world.

Led by Professor Trine Flockhart.

The cross-border mobility of ideas and norms, populations, and commercial exchange have shaped the development of modern world. Historically, as today, questions about the legitimacy of such mobilities—and the legitimate authorities and rules for governing them—sit at the epicenter of many contemporary conflicts and collective challenges. This collective project will focus on the political and social effects of the mobility of ideas, populations and commercial exchange broadly defined, as well as the political and institutional mechanisms that seek to shape and control them. The project will contribute to a comparative understanding of how transnational flows of idea, people, and commerce are being recast in new modernisation narratives, and how they are influencing domestic social cohesion and the dynamics of social rupture. The project will also seek to build knowledge linkages across policy domains typically treated in insolation, including migration, restrictive and liberal economic policies, and the flow and governance of ideas, both religious and secular.

Fellows will be encouraged to engage with the question of “how is mobility governed?” in their policy field, and to embark on empirical research in collaboration with STG faculty, researchers and fellows. Fellows will also be encouraged to use their expertise to further critical scholarly and policy debates about the social, political and systemic consequences of specific mobility governance choices, and their comparative relevance.

Led by Professor Kristin Fabbe.