Preterm birth is an increasingly important cause of inequality in Europe. Incidence rates and survival after preterm birth have increased over the last decades while rates of adverse outcomes regarding education, health, quality of life, partnering, employment chances, and prosperity across the lifespan remain. This project will investigate what factors provide protection and increase resilience for preterm children’s life course outcomes. It will consider protective/resiliency factors at the individual (such as specific educational skills), micro-system (including parental socio-economic status, quality of parenting, and peer relations) and macro-system level (including differences regarding the countries’ educational systems, welfare systems, and income inequality). By studying transitions at all stages of the life cycle up to old age, the project is crosscutting the themes of the call. The collaborative group consists of leading researchers on preterm children’s development in Europe and will work on existing data from specific preterm cohorts and population longitudinal and panel studies (from Finland, Germany, Switzerland, and the UK) and the National Social and Health registers from Finland. The collaborative study brings together four research groups based in the UK, Finland, and Germany across the disciplines of Psychology, Economics, and Public Health covering complementary strengths. The results will inform the future design of interventions to promote the health, prosperity, and wellbeing of those born preterm at all stages of their lifecycle. Close exchange and collaboration with various stakeholder groups has already been established.

SepaRope is the first empirically-grounded and comparative project rethinking the theory and practices of Separation of powers in present-day European Union. It addresses the very core of ‘democratic governance in a turbulent age’ and connects to all themes of the call. Separation of powers, the classic model of decision-making, entrusts different state functions to different branches (legislative, executive, judiciary) and serves the double purpose of ensuring collective will-formation and control of those in power. The polyarchic multilevel nature of the EU is not easily reconciled with the separation-of-powers-model, either at EU or national level. SepaRope demonstrates in combined horizontal and vertical inquiries how recent economic and political developments affect the EU’s institutional framework and the anchoring of EU decision-making in national legitimacy. It combines conceptual constitutional analysis with empirical research in three fields (Economic and Monetary Union, migration, trade), in which EU decision-making is controversial, rights-sensitive and illustrative of recent power shifts. Working package 1 develops a joint conceptual framework for identifying and examining will-formation and control structures. WP2-4 conduct autonomous but interlinked empirical and legal-analytical studies of the three branches in the three policy fields, respectively, exposing ever-increasing ‘grey areas’ of diffuse, ring-fenced, and informalised public power. WP2-4 demonstrate the three branches’ mutually constitutive nature and contingency of power shifts. WP5 makes concrete innovative and practically viable suggestions to EU and national institutional actors on how will-formation and control structures can be strengthened in the polyarchic multilevel EU. Stakeholders are involved as interviewees and participants.

Protestant Legacies in Nordic Law: Uses of the Past in the Construction of the Secularity of Law (ProNoLa) is relevant to the HERA call by researching the conscious and unconscious uses of the Lutheran and broader Protestant past for the construction and institutionally embedding of norms and values in Nordic secular law. The overarching goal of ProNoLa is to examine relations between Lutheran majority traditions, broader Protestant theology, and the development of secular law in the Nordic region in the course of the last 500 years. Highlighting the numerous ruptures, twists and turns in the relationship between law and secularity, the project aims to provide a more complex, nuanced and critical genealogy of the negotiations of law and religion in the Nordic and German realms. The expected outcome of the research is thus a reformulated grand history about interlinkages between Lutheran and broader Protestant theology within majority and minority churches and the secularity of the law; not only in the historic period until the Enlightenment era, but during subsequent periods into the current re-confessionalisation and internationalization of relations between religions, state and law. ProNoLa is implemented by organizing research symposia with subsequent publications and dissemination concerning four overlapping but distinct historical periods involving transformation processes and turns; taking its point of departure in Lutheran reformation and reaching into a 21st Century religiously pluralist future. Finally, in the fifth turn, Norden meets Europe the re-telling of the grand history is presented and disseminated to a wider academic and non-academic public.

Helping individuals to behave more healthily is vital to preventing cardiovascular disease. Thanks to low costs and broad reach, digital behaviour change interventions may be a viable option for population level prevention efforts. Current digital interventions fall short of that goal however, as they do not reliably change behaviour. While there is a wealth of evidence on which behaviour change techniques (BCTs) effectively translate behavioural intentions into action, there has been surprisingly little consideration of which BCTs support the motivational processes that underlie individuals? decisions to enact behavioural changes and engage with (digital) behaviour change interventions in the first place. A Rubicon grant will allow me to fill this gap in the literature within the Department of Social Research (DSR) at the University of Helsinki. Using my expertise in literature synthesis (systematic reviewing, meta-analysis), I will first identify which BCTs are most important in supporting motivation for health behaviour change. I will then draw on the DSR?s vast knowledge of human-computer interactions, usability and computerised gaming to develop the identified BCTs into motivational components of a smartphone app, and examine how combinations of these BCTs contribute to motivation for change, sustained engagement with the app, and increases in physical activity. Keywords: behaviour change; motivation; physical activity; meta-analysis; digital interventions

INDIGO is a project on pressing issues affecting the future of democratic governance in Europe and the relation between the individual and the public sphere. INDIGO undertakes a structured analysis and develops an innovative approach to analysing and addressing the impact of digitalisation of the multi-jurisdictional implementation of policies in Europe through joint information systems and the use of advanced machine learning systems based on algorithms on possibilities of steering of decision-making by democratic legislation, individual participation, the protection of fundamental rights and the enforcement of the rule of law through independent judicial review. The objectives and outcome are, first, to map the profoundly transformative impact of innovative information technologies on rule-making and decision-making procedures and their impact on constitutional values enshrined in EU public law. Second, to develop future-proof regulatory approaches to realising these values in an age of technological innovation. INDIGO will thereby develop pathways to ensure that the use of information technology will both enhance the rule of law, democracy, transparency and the protection of fundamental individual rights as well as efficiency in problem solving and provision of public goods. INDIGO cuts across themes 3, 4 and 5 having as subjects inter alia democracy and information, expertise and the locus of engagement influencing public decision-making and questions of the nature of their authority and accountability. The consortium will closely work together in working groups with legal scholars, STS social scientists and Computer Science experts, led as PI by the originator and coordinator of the ReNEUAL project.