The CROSS-REIS project, funded under the Horizon Europe European Excellence Initiative, aims to strengthen research excellence and to foster innovation ecosystems that support the transition towards a regenerative economy. On 1 September 2026 that work was carried into one of the region's largest foreign policy gatherings. Prof. Žiga Turk of the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, University of Ljubljana (UL FGG), a CROSS-REIS partner institution, spoke in the panel “Who Owns the Green Future? Power, Dependency, and the New Resource Order” at the twenty-first Bled Strategic Forum.
The Forum was held on 31 August and 1 September 2026 in Bled under the title “The Power to Shape the Future”, organised by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia together with the Centre for European Perspective. The CROSS-REIS delegation from the Faculty of Economics, University of Niš (FEUN), the project's coordinating institution, was led by the project coordinator prof. Jelena Stanković.
The session ran from 14:00 to 15:00 in the Zrak Hall of the Rikli Balance Hotel. Alongside prof. Turk it brought together Pauline Anaman, Coordinator of the Green Transition Practice at AB & David Africa, Ghana; Slavko Ažman, Head of Business Management at Porsche Slovenija; Charles Hendry CBE, former UK Minister of Energy; Romain Ravet, Senior Country Representative for the Democratic Republic of the Congo at The Carter Center; and Sabrina Schulz, Germany Director of the European Initiative for Energy Security. The discussion was moderated by Dan Sanaren, Sahel Research Coordinator in the Conflict Resolution Program of The Carter Center.
The session sits in the Forum's agenda for 1 September, alongside the parallel tracks running in the other four halls.
The panel was convened to examine how the green transition is reshaping global competition, resource dependencies, supply chains and the balance of power. Its title puts the problem plainly. The shift to clean energy and low-carbon industry rests on materials, technologies and capital that are not evenly distributed, and the states and companies that control them are not always the ones setting the climate targets.
The line-up brought those positions into one room: a green transition practitioner from Ghana, a representative of an organisation working in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a European automotive manufacturer, a former energy minister, an energy security analyst and a professor of engineering.
CROSS-REIS works on regenerative economies and on the innovation ecosystems that carry research through to practice, and the University of Ljubljana is one of the project's partner institutions. Sessions of this kind are where the questions the project works on are argued in front of the people who write the policy: who carries the cost of the transition, how supply chains are governed, and how a region builds the capacity to take part rather than only to supply.
The Bled Strategic Forum has been held since 2006 and has grown into one of the leading international conferences in Central and South-Eastern Europe. The 2026 edition opened on 31 August with a welcome address by Tone Kajzer, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia, and a keynote address by Janez Janša, Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia.
More about the Forum on its official website, the full agenda of both days, and the sessions on the Forum's official YouTube channel.