35 years of cooperation around the Baltic Sea

“Interest and engagement among the member countries has grown and developed a great deal over time,” she says.

What started as an initiative to resume the exchange of information after the Iron Curtain came down has developed into a broad network of contacts around the Baltic Sea region. Today, 121 participating universities in ten countries cooperate within the BUP.

“After the fall of the Berlin Wall, there was an incredible lack of knowledge about the other side. Even though they were our neighbours, they were relatively closed to us,” says Madeleine Granvik.

At the time, it was Professor Lars Rydén at the Department of Earth Sciences who presented the idea of starting a university network in the Baltic Sea region to the administration at Uppsala University. In spring 1990, the first vice-chancellors conference was held in Lithuania. A year later, Uppsala University hosted a follow-up conference.

“Since there was little knowledge about the universities in Eastern Europe, just inviting them was a challenge: where to send the invitations and to who? Uppsala University hoped that 20 universities would attend the meeting, but fortunately 33 turned up,” says Madeleine Granvik.

Valuable platform for university teachers, scholars and students

Initially, there were no explicit strategies and plans for the Programme. But in 2016, Uppsala’s then Vice-Chancellor Eva Åkesson signed a contract with 59 BUP participating universities, which heralded a new era for the Programme and a better structure for its organisation. Since 2017, the BUP has worked with five-year strategies, followed up with an action plan for each financial year.

"The Programme serves as a valuable platform for university teachers, scholars and students to obtain and exchange knowledge and research results, and to establish collaborations in an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary and intercultural academic environment.”

According to Madeleine Granvik, participating universities have increasingly realised the importance of reaching out to colleagues and students who want to work with the BUP and participate in the Programme’s activities.

“Our core fields are sustainability issues and democracy. Over the years, we also started to focus on specific themes.”

Ten themes around sustainable development

For the last seven years, the BUP has structured its work around ten themes related to the Sustainable Development Goals in the UN’s 2030 Agenda. These themes are Climate Change, Energy Systems, Sustainable Societies, Sustainable Water Resources, Urban-Rural Development, Sustainable Mobility, Circular Economy, Sustainable Tourism, Education for Sustainable Development, and Sustainable Food Systems. Some of the themes are currently being revised.

But how has its work with sustainability changed since the BUP started? According to Madeleine Granvik, the conditions are completely different today from what they were during the 1990s and well into the 2000s.

“Then, there was still a big difference between countries in the West, including the Nordic countries, and the East. But that’s not the same these days. Today, all countries within the BUP have progressed further and have much more well-established laws, institutions and research on sustainable development. And today there are so many competing networks and organisations working with sustainability issues, which was not the case 35 years ago.”

Around 2022, the BUP conducted a survey on how the participating universities work with sustainability issues on campus in terms of leadership, education and research. About half responded, with 78 per cent of these stating that they had a policy or strategy for working with sustainability issues. But half stated that they did not have a special department responsible for these issues. In terms of teaching, 86 per cent stated they have courses in different disciplines that address sustainability issues, while 36 per cent stated that they provide interdisciplinary courses in sustainable development.

Important to bring together different academic cultures

Something Madeleine Granvik also sees as a key success factor in the BUP is its model where different disciplines meet in working groups around, for example, courses.

“It's important to bring together different academic cultures from different countries, different universities and from different disciplines. The BUP encourages interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary collaborations where we can learn from each other and also be challenged a bit.”

According to her, the key to great cooperation lies in finding colleagues who are genuinely engaged, and interested in wanting to cooperate and learn from each other. Each member country also has a BUP National Centre with a Centre Director and a team that pursues BUP matters, which has been crucial to achieving stability and continuity of engagement within the organisation.

“Historically, there has been a lot of focus on us here in Uppsala, which is the seat of the Coordinating Secretariat. For ten years, we’ve been working to decentralise the organisation in various ways, for example through the Presidency, where a country can influence the organisation in practice for six months and organise various BUP activities,” she says.

New target group: Offices for International Relations

In addition to an annual report, the BUP produces publications related to the Programme’s research symposia, such as the one held at Uppsala University last November, as well as other collaborations with academic journals.

Other activities include conferences and continuing education for university teachers, student conferences, summer schools, doctoral student training courses and continuing education courses in supervision.

"We address undergraduate students, doctoral students, scholars and teachers, as well as to some extent the leaderships at the universities through our vice-chancellor conferences. A new target group that we’ve been working with for two years now is offices for international relations, which exist at all the universities,” says Madeleine Granvik.

In the Baltic Sea cooperation, two nations are conspicuous by their absence: Russia and Belarus. However, this has not always been the case.

“There were collaborations with, for example, St Petersburg State University and Belarusian Technical University in Minsk from the early 1990s, but due to the war against Ukraine we had to give up all collaborations and lost twelve participating universities. Times and circumstances change too. Today many of the questions being pursued are related to resilience, crisis preparedness and security, which were the focus of the BUP Symposium last autumn.”

The BUP is currently planning for the vice-chancellor conference that is held every four years. During the autumn, all vice-chancellors at the 121 participating universities will be invited to Uppsala in September 2027 to celebrate the University's 550th anniversary.

“It will be a great opportunity to discuss the responsibility and role of universities in times of uncertainty and crisis, and when democratic values, academic freedom and international cooperation are facing increased challenges in some parts of the world. As the world and the region develop, The Baltic University Programme will probably continue to serve its purpose for at least another 35 years,” says Madeleine Granvik.

Anneli Björkman