Stakeholders

Next to its "shareholders", the Agency has a set of important "stakeholders", both inside and outside the European Union.

Some of them are organisations working for civilian user communities, such as the European Commission and the European Space Agency. Increasingly EDA is synchronising its R&T investment with those two organisations in order prevent that taxpayers’ money is spent twice for research in dual-use technologies. In November 2009 the Council underlined the added-value of dual use capabilities and gave further impetus to the work related to seeking synergies between the EU civil and military capability development.

EDA also interacts with the Commission on a number of other issues, such as defence industry and market activities, and areas of overlapping civil-military capabilities and assets such as Maritime SurveillanceUnmanned Aircraft Systems and Software Defined Radio.

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In the stricter defence area EDA is closely interacting with a wide variety of international organisations, including NATO, under the premise of seeking complementarity and mutually-reinforcing capability development.

As the level of "formal" relations, the Agency actively contributes to the EU-NATO Capability Group. At the "informal level", EDA has a wide network of staff-to-staff contacts with NATO counter-parts in Allied Command Transformation (ACT), NATO Headquarters and NATO Agencies.

At the European level of Defence, EDA works closely with OCCAR (Organisation Conjointe de Coopération en matière d'ARmement), the Bonn-based European organisation for multinational procurement programme management. The Agency also interacts closely with the Letter of Intent (LoI), the six largest Defence industrial nations in Europe.

On the defence industry side, EDA's primary interlocutor is the Aerospace and Defence Industries Association in Europe (ASD) - but the Agency also has a network of contacts with National Industry Associations (NDIAs).

"The Commission is investing € 200 million per year in research and technological development for "security" – under the European Security Research Programme – and the same amount for "space". In addition, the European Space Agency (ESA) allocates up to € 300 million per year to space-related technology research within an overall budget of € 3bn yearly. The EDA participating Member States invest a total amount of approximately € 120 million per year in collaborative defence related research." Catherine Ashton, Head of EDA, February 2010.

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EDA Bulletin 11 on shareholders and stakeholders