Link4Skills is a global research and innovation project on skill shortages. The acronym reflects the objectives of the call by linking for/4 fair skill matching. It embeds 4 processes of responding to skill shortages: re/up skilling of established populations (incl. migrants and inactive women), raising wages, automation and migration. It considers 4 continents: Europe, Africa, Asia and America, where skill shortages and skill flows will be analysed. It develops the AI-Assisted Skill Navigator for stakeholders from employment, vocational training organisations in origins and destinations. Link4Skills will scrutinize: (a) how to identify the existing and emerging required skills in changing labour markets?; (b) how the EU should respond to skill shortages?; (c) how to recruit the required skills from various pools either from the existing workforce (including established migrant populations and inactive women) also supported by automation, and from the workforce from non-EU countries? The project combines data on skill gaps and matching in the EU with analyses about human capital in origins; investigates emerging and established migration skill corridors between EU and India, Morocco, Ghana, Nigeria, Philippines, Indonesia, and Ukraine, in order to make enriched inventories of skill partnerships. The project achieves its aims via econometric microsimulations based on EU databases, combining skill supply and demand, and by data collections and stakeholders’ expertise oversees. The knowledge will be nested in the AI-Assisted Skill Navigator (TRL5) which is a Knowledge-Based Expert System, that goes beyond existing policy dashboards. It is an open access system available to public. It is co-created by labour market stakeholders in every partner country. Partners will take care about stakeholders’ involvements in the project, by enhancing tailor-made communication and dissemination. The project will also produce Link4Skill Podcast Series and academic outlets.

GAPs is a comprehensive study on the drivers of return policies and barriers/enablers in international cooperation on returns. The project examines the disconnects between expectations of return policies and their actual outcomes by de-centering the dominant, one-sided understanding of “return policymaking.” GAPs will: a) scrutinize the shortcomings of the EU’s governance of returns with both its internal and external dimensions; b) analyse enablers and barriers of international cooperation c) shed light on the perspectives of migrants themselves to understand their knowledge of return policies, aspirations and experiences. By taking a close look at governance, cooperation and actor’s agency, the project is able to suggest new avenues for international cooperation, develop recommendations for stakeholders and explore alternative pathways to returning migrants. The project combines its decentering approach with three innovative concepts: a focus on return migration infrastructures that enable GAPs to analyze governance fissures; an analysis of return migration diplomacy to understand how relations among EU MSs and with third countries hinder cooperation on returns; and a trajectory approach that uses a socio-spatial and temporal lens to understand migrant agency. The project achieves its aims via multi-disciplinary, qualitative and quantitative comparative research in 11 countries in Europe, Africa and the broader Middle East (including Afghanistan). The project involves wide-ranging and innovative impacts, including the creation of interactive data repository on returns, a return cooperation index, return governance indicators, policy briefs and workshops, the formation of stakeholder expert panels, a digital storytelling and video series, the launching of Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) as well as open access policy and scholarly publications.

The vision of PROTECT is to discover ways of further advancing the international protection system within today’s turbulent political context. As a corollary to fluctuations in political cleavage systems of host countries, states’ policy approaches to international protection are drifting away from the humanitarian norms, objectives and methods provided by the current international law. The international refugee regime risks entering an era of decay because of declining citizen support, increasing party populism, growing government opportunism, and the subsequent scapegoating of international organizations. The United Nations’ Global Compact on Migration and the Global Compact on Refugees, which aim to introduce global governance and burden-sharing systems in the areas of migration and international protection, will have to be implemented in a context of international power relations between advocates of different visions of world order and notions international protection associated with them. In order to assess the challenges and opportunities that the Global Compacts pose, PROTECT will organize its research and dissemination efforts around three dimensions of international protection: (a) rights, (b) governance, and (c) public recognition. PROTECT aims to: (1) develop perspectives to international protection that address the challenges posed by the current politically turbulent context (2) assess the impacts of the Global Compacts on the right to international protection, discovering ways of reconstructing their relationships with the pre-existing legal frames that advance international protection (3) assess the impacts of the Global Compacts on the governance of international protection, discovering the most effective modes of global governance (4) assess the impact of the Global Compacts on the public recognition of the right to international protection, identifying the networks and discourses that hinder or facilitate support to international protection.