On 31 August and 1 September 2026 the twenty-first Bled Strategic Forum brought policymakers, business leaders, researchers and civil society to Bled under the title “The Power to Shape the Future.” Prof. Jelena Stanković, coordinator of the UR-WISE project, took part on behalf of the Faculty of Economics, University of Niš (FEUN), the project's host institution. The Forum is organised by the Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia together with the Centre for European Perspective, and has been held every year since 2006.
The Forum opened in the Bled Festival Hall on the afternoon of Monday 31 August with a welcome address by Tone Kajzer, Minister of Foreign and European Affairs of the Republic of Slovenia, followed by the keynote address of Janez Janša, Prime Minister of the Republic of Slovenia. Maia Mazurkiewicz, host of Anatomy of Disinformation on TVP World, was master of ceremonies.
The opening led straight into the Prime Ministers' Session, “Shaping Europe from its Centre,” which brought together Andrej Babiš of the Czech Republic, Janez Janša of Slovenia, Péter Magyar of Hungary and Andrej Plenković of Croatia, moderated by Sebastjan Jeretič of the Government Communication Office of Slovenia. A Presidential Conversation between Peter Pellegrini of the Slovak Republic and Nataša Pirc Musar of the Republic of Slovenia followed at 15:25, and at 16:05 the BSF Distinguished Partner Award 2026 was presented, followed by a conversation between President Pirc Musar and Oleksandra Matviichuk of the Center for Civil Liberties, Ukraine, one of the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize recipients.
From there the programme divided across the Festival Hall, the Rikli Balance Hotel and the Grand Hotel Toplice. Monday's economic track ran in the Arnold Hall with “Rebuilding Prosperity: Labour, Capital and the State Working Together” and “Shaping the Future: The Region's Opportunity to Lead,” while the Festival Hall hosted the Foreign Ministers' Session on Central and South-Eastern Europe in a world of corridors, security and enlargement.
Tuesday ran parallel tracks from eight in the morning: the age of multi-alignment, enlargement as a geopolitical tool, the future of European health systems, connectivity and trade corridors, the transatlantic alliance, international law when great powers ignore it, security in the Indo-Pacific, demography and Europe's strategic choices, Adriatic infrastructure, sovereignty for small states in the digital age, the green resource order, democracy and artificial intelligence, and water in a poly-crisis world.
The full agenda of both days is published on the Forum's own site.
Several of those sessions sit directly on UR-WISE's own ground. “Counting the Cost: Demography, Power, and Europe's Strategic Choices” took up the population trends that shape regional economies; “The Adriatic Advantage” and “Corridors of Power” took up connectivity and infrastructure; “Can the State Still Steer?” took up the capacity of public institutions to act on evidence. Those are the questions UR-WISE works on from the research side: urban and regional development, demographic trends and migration, data-driven policy making, sustainability and resilience, and regional economic integration and innovation.
Attendance also serves the project's own structural aims. UR-WISE is building a research group at FEUN around ERA Chair holder Professor Aura Reggiani, and part of that work is placing the Faculty inside the European networks where urban and regional policy is actually discussed. A forum of this standing, in the region, is a direct route to the policymakers and institutions the project needs to reach.
More about the Forum on its official website, the full agenda of both days, and the sessions on the Forum's official YouTube channel.
UR-WISE will continue to take part in high-level policy dialogue in the region, and to bring what it learns there back into the project's research on resilient urban and regional futures.