Council of the Baltic Sea States:
The Role of a Sustainable and Prosperous
Region in Bringing Science Diplomacy
Forward. EL-CSID Working Paper Issue 2018/19 • July 2018
2017 has been a year full of promising major milestones for the future EU Science Diplomacy Strategy.
At the beginning of 2017, the Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (DG RTD) of the
European Commission released a thought-provoking report Tools for an EU science diplomacy (Van
Langenhove, 2017). This publication was accompanied with a recognition among some parts of the
academic circles and practitioners that the "Union is in process of reinforcing its diplomacy for
science (the classical international S&T cooperation), while developing a genuine science for
diplomacy" (López de San Román & Schunz, 2018, p. 262). Later on others have called the subsequent
developments a worldwide "jump on the “science diplomacy” bandwagon" (Penca, 2018, p. 1).
In the Baltic Sea Region setting, on 20 June 2017, the Reykjavík Ministerial of the Council of the Baltic
Sea States (CBSS) took place and resulted in a Declaration on the Occasion of the 25th Anniversary of
the CBSS (CBSS, 2017), as well as the endorsement of Realizing the Vision: Baltic 2030 Action Plan
(CBSS Secretariat, 2017), which serves as "a solid basis for concrete CBSS action to meet the
Sustainable Development Goals at regional level" (CBSS, 2017, p. 2).
The report Tools for an EU science diplomacy outlines promising recommendations for further
assembly of cases, which might serve as reference points or potential sources of inspiration once
crafting the main structures and guidance enshrined in the upcoming 'EU Science Diplomacy
Strategy'. As it will be outlined in subsequent paragraphs, the CBSS-endorsed multilateral cooperation
initiatives have spurred various macro-regional dynamics of implicit science diplomacy,1 which might
serve as a source of inspiration in the crafting of certain elements for the forthcoming strategy
