European Countries have agreed on a common strategy to promote the use of renewable energy and the energy efficiency. Also other countries are about to face an energy revolution. To support the energy transition, all countries need to build internal competences, to train energy experts, to enact energy policies and design a system of incentives, to support business and local market, also through international collaborations. Objective of the project is to build an original data set intended to evaluate the impact on sustainable development (job/enterprise creation, women empowerment, internazionalization and new migration patterns) of European Union programs of Capacity Building and Knowledge Transfer in the renewable energy sector at Higher Education level. Moreover, a specific objective is to investigate the effectiveness of trainings to improve the quality of future proposals and to define innovative training methodologies to be adapted to different contexts. The project combines the long experience in international collaborations and the technical competences on low impact technologies, energy efficiency and training/education reached by the researchers at the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (DIMA), the statistical and econometric skills of the team at the Department of Statistics (DSS) with the technical knowledge of the Department of Informatics (DI) on development of online platforms. The research framework associated with ERASMUS + projects running at Sapienza University wants to be a test dimension for creating a survey model replicable in more varied and comprehensive contexts.
The IRENE project aims to introduce three main elements of novelty to the current state of the art. First, the target of our study on the impact of vocational training in the renewable energy sector is innovative and crucial in the worldwide battle for diminishing energy dependence, reducing emission of CO2 and creating new employment. Second, following a gender approach, the project is going to investigate the impact of vocational training in the energy sector on women empowerment, which, to the best of our knowledge, has never been analysed. Third, the survey is going to include controls of subjects attitude to risk, analyzed via an innovative methodology (Bivariate Random Preference estimator based on information provided by sMPL data). Preferences over risk and perceptions of the riskiness of different activities by trained students are elicited with the aim of investigating whether the causal relation between risk taking and entrepreneurship/international mobility holds true also in our sample. In fact, existent research (Vandor 2009) has shown that international mobility and entrepreneurial action are both characterized by higher risks, but (presumably) allow higher returns than employment in the domestic labour market.
The innovative dataset that the project is meant to build will contain both a short-term impact estimate measuring the effect on participant outcomes approximately one year after the completion of the programme and a medium-term impact estimate - giving the effect approximately 2 years after completion. We also have longer-term (4 year) impacts for one-quarter of the samples. These estimates will enable us to compare shorter- and longer-term effects of both vocational and theoretical university training on renewable energy, and test whether the different kinds of training approach are associated with a difference in the programme impact.
In order to raise awareness also within communities, society and local and international stakeholders on the benefits of trainings in the sustainable energy sector, empirical results will be disseminated online and published through academic and institutional international channels.
Indeed, the impact evaluation results could potentially provide manifold suggestions. Firstly, they could identify best practices and virtuous mechanisms on training approaches useful as references for other similar projects. Secondly, they could propose a factual base for planning political strategies and initiatives to improve the quality of education/research and, consequently, the life of local communities in terms of job/enterprises creation, the breaking of women exclusion traps and pollution abatement. Thirdly, they could validate theoretical assertions and political approaches that study interactions across social, economic and environmental factors, such as the frameworks about smart, sustainable and inclusive growth described in the Europe 2020 strategy, structural changes for equality stressed by ECLAC, and finally the inclusive green growth aimed by the World Bank.