Political Dialogue

Putting the interests of regional Space Users at the centre, NEREUS will engage in political dialogue with relevant institutional players, such as the European Parliament, the European Commission and its agencies, the Committee of the Regions and the European Space Agency. NEREUS will continue its advocacy to underline the Regions’ role in the implementation of the European Space Strategy and highlight the user dimension. ln this pursuit, strengthening relations with other stakeholder organisations is considered vital to identify commonalities and joint political objectives. ln this context and amongst others, the network offers its members a platform to define political positions and a forum to discuss and exchange current technological and socio-economic-technological evolutions. The network emphasizes the meaning of Space across sectors addressing the relevant policy domains, regional strategies and programs. As a consequence, NEREUS has a two-fold approach:

• technology- and thematic-oriented, in order to ensure the convergence of upstream space technologies’ development and citizen’s best interests
• as well as addressing the impacts of Space on different application domains with high relevance for citizens and their regions.

ln the spirit of a bottom-up approach, to get closer to the regional ecosystems, the network will commit to highlight space solutions in different application domains from public health to agriculture and digitalisation, while stimulating the exchange of experiences and showing how spacebased information and new space applications can be exploited to complement public, regional and territorial policy objectives but also the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development etc. The network considers of great importance to advocate for (i) optimal framework conditions for the development and uptake of Space applications in conjunction with publicly funded programs and initiatives, as well as (ii) globally competitive markets for Space based services and products that respond to the needs of society and serve public policy purposes.