The focus of the LIAISE Winter School will be on Impact Assessment (IA) as a general procedural framework for policy appraisal in decision-making processes. Policy-level impact assessments such as Regulatory Impact Assessment (RIA) and more recently Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA) have been applied over the past years in different venues all over Europe. To support policy assessments within such generic frameworks, different methods and tools can be deployed. These can help to generate or structure scientific evidence, to design possible future scenarios or to model complex and dynamic social, economic or environmental developments.

The LIAISE Winter School will be organized as a training course on discussing, using and developing especially advanced computer-based modelling tools and participatory approaches for policy assessment. The Winter School will deliver an overview and new insights into different tools and assessment methods. Participants will learn how to generate data and how models and tools can be used for policy assessments. Furthermore the utilization of advanced and complex tools will be discussed drawing on the understanding of the role of tools within policy-making processes. The interdependencies between modellers and users of tools and policy makers will be discussed throughout the training course. This encompasses user needs and how to integrate these in the development of advanced modelling tools. This should help modellers to get an understanding of how the application of tools within decision-making processes can be enhanced.

The LIAISE Winter School will combine different modelling strategies and approaches from the natural sciences as well as modelling in economics and in the field of sustainability. Qualitative and participatory approaches for impact assessment will also be addressed. Practical training sessions, hands-on applications, as well as discussions and short presentations of the participants’ own research projects will be the key elements of the Winter School. The combination of different approaches will make the Winter School a truly interdisciplinary experience with lecturers from all over Europe.