Belmont Forum: Demystifying International Funding for Research

Promoting collaboration within one country is easier than promoting collaboration across borders. One of the major challenges with transboundary research is the lack of available funding for all parties to work together on one project or topic. Global funding pots are few and far between and money does not cross borders easily. To further compound this difficulty, it is not easy for research agencies to develop bilateral or even multilateral funding calls and when they do they are often done once on a given topic or theme. These challenges are often compounded when building collaboration across the Global South.
Many of the global environmental change challenges facing our societies today are challenges that transcend geopolitical borders, and require us to come together to effectively engage them. They require us to find ways to come together around common societal challenges, working collaboratively to identify acceptable solutions. They also require us to bring in societal partners and actors, working in equitable partnerships, to address these challenges in a real-world context, with those who have lived experience.
To address this issue, the Belmont Forum came together as an international partnership of global funders and developed a system that promotes collaboration in societally relevant, transdisciplinary global environmental change projects across in a multilateral context. These countries span not only the Global North, but also the Global South. Developing collaborative funding projects within this context can be challenging - but allow researchers to work together on international projects that can have global scopes. This session will address how the Belmont Forum works and will aim to demystify the Belmont Forum process, learning from researchers who have successfully received funding through the Belmont Forum process, deciphering CRA Annexes - explaining the breadth and flexibility of this multinational funding process and helping you to start planning your next Belmont Forum project proposal.