Reconstructing the Union was the ambitious but timely theme of CEPS’ fourth big forum for debate, the Ideas Lab. High level speakers from eleven different policy domains shared their expertise on the many and complex challenges facing Europe.
In the view of many, this was the best Ideas Lab to date, with a total of 834 participants attending the event over two days – a 14% increase on last year. Of these participants, 511 (61.27%) were men and 323 (38.73%) women.
Eighty-three participants (9.95%) came from universities; 275 (32.97%) from institutions; 200 (23.98%) from think tanks; 191 (22.90%) from private companies and 85 (10.19%) from other sectors (NGOs, trade unions, the media).
In terms of countries represented, 472 participants (56.59%) came from Belgium; 331 (39.69%) from the rest of Europe (mostly Germany, France, Italy and the UK); 21 (2.52%) from outside Europe; and 10 (1.20%) and mentioned no country.
So far overwhelmingly positive feedback has been received from participants.
The 2017 CEPS Ideas lab was organised in collaboration with the Maltese Presidency of the European Council and the Malta Financial services Authority; we are enormously grateful to both for their support and input into the choice of topics and prime talks of this year’s conference. Other research institutes and foundations contributed to individual Labs with both human and financial resources and various CEPS corporate members also provided financial means. We offer our warm thanks to all of them for the support and input that helped to make this year’s Ideas Lab a great success.
The full programme is available here.
Video of day 1 and photo gallery of the event.
Watch the Special CEPS Ideas Lab lecture on European (dis)-integration in an age of Populism with Timothy Garton Ash, Professor at Oxford University.
