AC21 Legacy International Symposium
On 18–20 March 2024, representatives from eleven of the fifteen former AC21 member universities gathered at Stellenbosch University, Freiburg, and Strasbourg — a three-hub hybrid event — for the Legacy International Symposium. It was the first major event organised under the AC21 banner since the consortium's dissolution in March 2023, and it was deliberately designed to be the last.
The symposium served a dual purpose. The first was substantive: three days of working sessions on SDG-aligned research, drawing on the 20-year history of AC21 and the collaborative infrastructure it had built. The second was archival: to formally conclude the consortium's intellectual programme and hand stewardship of its documentary record to the AC21 Legacy Fund.
SDG Focus: Goals 3, 7, and 9
The symposium centred on three of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals, chosen because they aligned with the research areas where AC21 member institutions had the strongest track record of collaboration.
SDG 3 (Good Health and Well-being) was the focus of the opening day. Presentations drew on AC21 research partnerships in public health, including the COVID-19 response project jointly funded by Shanghai Jiao Tong University and the University of Adelaide through the Special Project Fund. A panel of five former SPF grant recipients discussed what consortium-level coordination had made possible that bilateral agreements alone could not.
SDG 7 (Affordable and Clean Energy) occupied the second day. The Jilin–Freiburg partnership on renewable energy grid integration, which had begun as an SPF project in 2018, presented its results alongside newer work from Nagoya and Adelaide on hydrogen storage. The session highlighted a recurring theme: small seed grants, when placed within a network of trusted institutional relationships, can generate research outputs disproportionate to the investment.
The third day addressed SDG 9 (Industry, Innovation, and Infrastructure), with a particular emphasis on how universities in the Global South and Global North can co-develop technological solutions. Stellenbosch and Gadjah Mada presented a joint framework for technology transfer that had emerged from their AC21 collaboration, now being adapted for use outside the consortium context.
The Transition to Legacy
The symposium's closing session was not academic in the traditional sense. It was an institutional handover. Director Hideki Kasuya, who had overseen the consortium's final years, formally transferred the AC21 archive — conference proceedings, newsletter volumes, SPF reports, and administrative records — to the Legacy Fund. The fund, established in 2022, is administered independently and charged with maintaining the documentary record and supporting this editorial project.
Several speakers addressed the broader question of what happens when international academic networks dissolve. The answer, based on the AC21 experience, is nuanced. The formal structures disappear. The secretariat closes. The email lists go quiet. But the relationships persist, and in many cases continue to generate collaborative output years after the network that created them has ceased to exist.
In our view, the Legacy Symposium demonstrated both the value and the fragility of consortium-level academic cooperation. Valuable, because the SDG-focused research presented at Stellenbosch would not have existed without the network. Fragile, because sustaining that network required institutional commitment that proved unsustainable once external conditions changed. The tradition of International Forums that AC21 maintained for twenty years was, in the end, dependent on a level of coordinated effort that no single institution could maintain alone.
The symposium proceedings are documented in AC21 publications and remain available through the Legacy Fund.