Ursula Läubli, the Director of the Swiss Cooperation Office, emphasized the Swiss contribution to strengthening the social science research system in Serbia by increasing capacities of researchers at universities and institutes to provide high quality research.

Project Manager, Martin Dietz reflected on the close cooperation PERFORM has had with its partners, working together on identifying the most pressing challenges that social science research faces today and finding the most effective solutions.

In order to gather key lessons from the past four years, Arnaldo Pellini from the Overseas Development Institute concluded, that building the capacity of all involved stakeholder to demand, produce, and use research-based evidence addresses only some of the problems that exist in the social science systems in Albania and Serbia.

“PERFORM has looked beyond capacity-building and the importance of creating coalitions and networks to produce changes in the system.  Perhaps the two most important lessons to be taken from PERFORM are the need to design an approach that brings researchers together in an informed way to explore and look below the surface of a problem, as well as the need to encourage local ownership for testing solutions without imposing solutions from outside.”

Supported by the Government of Switzerland, PERFORM has been implemented in Serbia and Albania during the period 2015-2018 with a budget of EUR 5 million. In collaboration with the key partners, Helvetas and University of Fribourg, the project aimed at strengthening the social science research community, facilitating better systemic linkages between social science research and policy makers, and creating favourable framework conditions for social science research.