Biotechnology is revolutionising industries across Europe, but only 53% of Europeans have trust in it.
The B-Trust project, funded by Horizon Europe, proposes to develop an inclusive and transparent governance model to build and maintain trust in the biobased and agri-food sectors, with the ultimate goal of facilitating the adoption of innovation and supporting the European bioeconomy.
Within this initiative, our challenge is to apply impact assessment methods by supporting the coordination, monitoring and supervision of social impacts. To do this, we started by designing the Theory of Change (TOC), a strategic tool to ensure that the project has a clear and measurable impact.
The role of TOC
Through the Theory of Change, the project aims to inform the public, engage stakeholders and exchange good practices, improving understanding of how consumers and practitioners perceive the risks and benefits of biotechnology.
The TOC is an important tool that enables the entire consortium to:
- Understand how needs, activities, results and short- and long-term objectives are interlinked;
- Verify the assumptions and conditions necessary to plan and carry out project activities;
- Pay attention to critical aspects that could put the project at risk and avoid possible problems.
Project actions will be built on the basis of TOC, which will ensure the impact and involvement of actors while maintaining the co-trajectories and engagement of civil society and stakeholders, the latter defined as catalysts for building trust.
The model will be applied to six biotechnology use cases, mapping perceived risks and benefits in order to increase confidence in it. The results will also be structured through a forum so that they can be replicated as a model in other research, policy-making, development and funding programmes.
B-Trust’s ToC is presented in both a visual and narrative format in order to be accessible and easy to understand for all stakeholders. The visual format provides an overview of the project logic and impact pathways, while the narrative format offers detailed intervention logic for key work packages and explanations of each element of the ToC and their interconnections.
