ARP are not tools aiming at selecting or carrying out research works (fundamental, applied or R&D projects) but they intend to stimulate the analysis on a given topic in order to gather the scientific community and to propose long and medium term pro-active solutions.

Hence, ARP intends to link up all kinds of potential partners in order to work in a multidisciplinary approach to exchange and disseminate knowledge, to analyse markets needs, to stimulate studies on scientific issues.

ARP’s results may lead the ANR to launch new research programs.

• What is at stake is to build a prospective study aiming at identifying research and innovation fields which require cooperation actions today and for the next ten years between Europe and the Mediterranean countries and also aiming at defining operating modes in order to facilitate cooperation in the fields related to research, training and innovation
• A specific attention will be paid to four priority fields and their interactions:
  - Health, especially emerging or rare diseases, their links with climate change and the movements of people and goods;
  - Agriculture, agrofood industries and long-term agricultural and food exchanges;
  - Energy and water: complementarities between the solar energy resources available in the South and the uses in the North;
  - cultural elements and the conditions for a fruitful encounter between civilisations
  

A consortium has been built up in order to cover the whole ARP field. Its members have been selected according to several criteria: experience in prospective analysis applied to areas of research identification, ability to call upon a large expert networks, specific skills on at least one theme covered by the ARP, variety of the institutions involved in order to ensure a real multi-actors process not limited to the research area.

Consortium members:

• Research institutes:
  BRGM, Cemagref, Ifremer, INSERM, IRD ; CIRAD and INRA are represented through the National Consortium for agriculture, food, animal health and the environment (Agreenium).
  The international scope and the cooperation links are also taken into account through the ERA-NET network «Coordination of Agricultural Research in the Mediterranean» (ARIMNet) which brings together ministries and research institutes from 12 Mediterranean countries.
  
• Academic and higher education institutes :
  Inter-academic Group for Development (GID) ; University Montpellier South of France (UMSF) and University of Corsica ; International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM) ; AgroParisTech, Agro Campus Ouest, Montpellier SupAgro and the National Veterinary College of Toulouse, represented through Agreenium
• Economic and innovation networks: Euro-Med Innovation network which federates the clusters in the Euro-Mediterranean region
• Other stakeholders: the Plan Bleu, Futuribles group, Agropolis International
  

In addition to the consortium members, others partners will be called upon for their specific skills. Representatives of competitiveness clusters and/or pre-existing clusters, stakeholders from the socio-economic world and foreign experts from other countries of the Mediterranean basin will be associated with the works carried out by the working groups.

The ARP is organized according to four stages:

• Stage 1 – Synthesis of existing prospective studies: this work is carried out by a team of 5 people. They will produce a Synthesis of previous prospective studies as a starting point for future works
• Stage 2 - Elaboration of a framework for a common prospective analysis: this second stage aims to elaborate hypothesis to the 2030-40 horizon. This work is carried out by a group of 20 transversal experts among them, 3 experts for each of the four ARP’s issues (health, agriculture and food, energy and water, cultures and civilization)
• Stage 3 – Identification of research main lines: 4 parallel thematic working groups will be set up (one for each theme) to identify research lines to be developed to face future evolutions. It also aims to analyse the cooperation possibilities between the different stakeholders (research, innovation, training, economic development) around the Mediterranean basin
• Stage 4 – Matching the working groups’ proposals, priority actions, cross issues: the transversal expert group will write a synthesis of the thematic groups’ works. This synthesis will have to pay special attention to the cross issues situated at interface