Overall structure of the reports – for more information, click here.
How to cite from the reports - for more information, click here.
Short summary country reports - to access the short summary, click here.
The short country reports are draft/working versions open for comment, and not yet approved by the European Commission. Any opinions expressed here - from interviewees, or persons cited, etc. are not necessarily the opinion of the consortium.
NOTE TO THE UPDATED SHORT COUNTRY REPORTS (2018 version)
- Pending approval from the Commission, the 2017 versions of the SCRs have been available to the public on the website of HoNESt for the past months seeking to collect feedback from the stakeholders. The existence of the SCRs has also been brought to the attention of those present at the stakeholder events that the Consortium held in Barcelona (for Southern Europe), London (for Central and Northern Europe) and in Munich (for Eastern Europe). The collected feedback from these and other interactions has now been introduced in the SCRs in the UPDATED 2018 version.
- The authors of individual SCRs remain responsible for the final content of the reports, which are not necessarily the views of the Consortium or the Commission.
WHAT TO EXPECT FROM THE SCR
- According to the original EU call (NFRP-12-2014), the project should be organized in different phases. In the first phase, historians shall provide the core facts and figures, based on available documents and other sources of information, complemented as appropriate by field investigations. This should result in a well-organised and documented database and historical record. Based on fundamental research, HoNESt historians shall analyse documentation and produce short country reports (SCRs).Therefore, the call and the DoA defined the structure of the project and the nature of the SCR.
- The very objective of SCRs was to provide social scientists with the empirical basis to be drawn upon for perception and engagement studies. Historians were asked to provide specific evidence for the identification of: events, actors, arguments and behaviors, and types of public engagements encountered over the past 60 years across 20 countries. This framework is simple enough to host data from very different political, social and ideological environments, while some variations in the basic structure of the SCRs are unavoidable. As a result, the SCRs are a distinct product from either what the historians or the social scientists would have produced on their own in the absence of the collaborative framework favored by the HoNESt structure.
- Historical data do not speak for themselves; archives are incomplete, ambiguous, contradictory, and confusing. In practice, both the Call itself and the DoA imposed the inductive approach on data collection adopted by HoNESt. The SCR had to provide substantiation of what happened in each country by making use of the best available evidence. There was no imperative to fit the country reports into the existing literature and produce novel arguments, but rather to be systematic in the process of collecting, analyzing and interpreting the evidence in order to answer the questions at stake. For over 20 countries with widely different historiographies, ranging from non-existent to massive, produced in a score of national and regional languages, the resulting task was challenging, and implied making use of a variety of sources depending on the case.
- The SCRs are a first, admittedly preliminary, step towards providing a long-term historical survey integrating social science analysis of nuclear energy’s relation with society. Imperfect, complex, and still under scrutiny from external reviewers but, as stated in the Consolidated Midterm Review Report, the collection of country reports in itself- some of them for countries without any significant historiography so far- is, however a major achievement, one of HoNESt most significant exploitable results and a remarkable achievement in such a short time period.
