mountain.TRIP

mountain.TRIP (mountain sustainability. Transforming Research Into Practice, meaning transforming research into practice and delevering research results on sustainable development in European mountains) was funded by the 7FP of the European Commission as a Support Project. The goal of mountain.TRIP has been to provide stakeholders, end-users and practitioners with readily accessible and understandable forms of research-based information relevant to sustainable development in mountain regions.

mountain.TRIP started where other EU projects have finished, translating research findings into useful information and developing relationships between users and researchers. It used multiple innovative mechanisms to ensure effective interaction with practitioners.

EU research projects generally focus on elucidating truths, not on communicating these truths to practitioners or the interested public. Research projects often produce valuable results, methods, tools and instruments, but at the end of the project neither time nor money remains to disseminate these results among practitioners and to the interested public. Furthermore, research results usually exist in forms recognized by the research community but not easily or quickly assimilated by communities of practice. mountain.TRIP closes the gap that currently exists between EU project findings and the needs of policy- and decision-makers, stakeholders in economy and environment, planners and administrators, non governmental organisations, end-users, and other members of groups representing the interests of citizens and industry of the most important mountain regions of Europe (referred to “practitioners”), mountain.TRIP did not just disseminate research results but rather synthesized results from multiple EU projects while adapting the format of that synthesis through continuous interaction with practitioners to meet their needs.

Tools developed in mountain.TRIP have been an information and communication social media plattform (mountain.COMMUNITY), a projects database (mountain.PROJECTS), a wiki (mountain.WOCUR), youtube videos (mountain.VIDEOS), a handbook (mountain.SEARCH) and many others like tutorials (f.i. for the Alpine Space project DIAMONT), brochures, posters etc.

Prof. Dr. Axel Borsdorf, IGF, lead; Mag. Fides Braun, IGF, administrator

http://www.mountaintrip.eu/