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The development of Research Management and Administration (RMA) in Europe is strongly connected with the development of the Science and Technology (S&T) policy of the European Union (EU). These policies were the result of a continuous debate between the member states and the European Commission and European Parliament.

Although there is no data on the early development of RMA, there are some publications on the history of the development of the S&T policy in Europe: the excellent publication ‘A History of European Union Research Policy’ by Luca Guzzetti (Guzzetti, 1995). Guzzetti’s book investigates the history of EU research policies from 1948 up to the preparation of the Fourth Framework Programme (FP) (1994–1998).

The RMA aspects are constructed mainly by oral history complemented with some written sources. The history shows a gradual development of the profession unevenly spread in time and European geography. This has mainly with the EU enlargement in the same period, when new member states were connected to the FP. The profession started with a few colleagues’ way back in the eighties of the last century as financial people were dealing with the first European financial reporting up to the present day where RMA is becoming a field of work attracting many new colleagues.

To combat climate change, protect biodiversity, maintain water quality, facilitate a just transition for workers and engage citizens and communities, a diversity of stakeholders across multiple levels work together and collaborate to co-create mutually beneficial solutions. This paper aims to illustrate how a 7.5-year collaboration between local communities, researchers, academics, companies, state agencies and policymakers is contributing to the reframing of industrial harvested peatlands to regenerative ecosystems and carbon sinks with impacts on ecological, economic, social and cultural systems.

The European Union LIFE Integrated Project, Peatlands and People, responding to Ireland’s Climate Action Plan, represents Europe’s largest rehabilitation of industrially harvested peatlands. It makes extensive use of marketing research for reframing strategies and actions by partners, collaborators and communities in the evolving context of a just transition to a carbon-neutral future.

The results highlight the ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing of peatlands from fossil fuel and waste lands to regenerative ecosystems bursting with biodiversity and climate solution opportunities. Reframing impacts requires muddling through the ebbs and flows of planned, possible and unanticipated change that can deliver benefits for peatlands and people over time.

At 3 of 7.5 years into a project, the authors are muddling through how ecological reframing impacts economic and social/cultural reframing. Further impacts, planned and unplanned, can be expected.

This paper shows how an impact planning canvas tool and impact taxonomy can be applied for social and systems change. The tools can be used throughout a project to understand, respond to and manage for unplanned events. There is constant learning, constantly going back to the impact planning canvas and checking where we are, what is needed. There is action and reaction to each other and to the diversity of stakeholders affected and being affected by the reframing work.

This paper considers how systemic change through ecological, economic, social and cultural reframing is a perfectly imperfect process of muddling through which holds the promise of environmental, economic, technological, political, social and educational impacts to benefit nature, individuals, communities, organisations and society.

Across societies, gendered climate response decisions remain top-down and have limited progress because the influenced risk dynamics and their interrelations are not adequately understood. This study aims to address this gap by proposing an interdisciplinary innovative method, called women climate vulnerability (WCV) index, for measuring and comparing a diverse range of risks that threaten to undermine the adaptive capacity and resilience of rural women.

This paper builds on the literature to identify 12 risk categories across physical, economic and political sectors that affect rural women. These categories and attendant 51 risk indicators form the WCV index. A case study in Ben Tre Province (Vietnam) was used to demonstrate the application of the WCV methodology to rural contexts. The authors combined empirical, survey and secondary data from different sources to form data on the indicators. Structured expert judgment was used to address data gaps. Empirical and expert data were combined using a few weighting steps and a comprehensive coding system was developed to ensure objective evaluation.

The WCV assessment results reveal a reasonably worrisome picture of women’s vulnerability in Ben Tre as top highest-likelihood and deepest-impact risks predominate in physical and economic risk sectors. Stability, human security and governance categories have lowest scores, demonstrating a fairly politically favourable condition in the province. The medium risk scores captured in land and infrastructure categories reveal promising determinants of the adaptation of women in this rural province. The results demonstrate the usefulness of the WCV index in collecting bottom-up data, evaluating a wide variety of risks that rural women face and pinpointing priority areas that need to be addressed.

The WCV is systematic, customisable and localised. It combines field research and empirical data through structured expert judgment, thus enables researchers to fill data gaps and to do evidence-based assessment about diverse risk vulnerabilities. By doing so, the WCV index gives critical insights into the challenges that rural women face. This enables local governments to better understand cross-sectoral risks, pinpoint priority areas of action and timely channel funding and policy resources to support women where they need it most.