The CEECEC kick off meeting was held in Paris on April 17, 2008. Here representatives of the Consortium met in person for the first time, the goals and aims of the project were clarified and questions fielded and addressed. Here began the initiation of the case study development process, whereby CSO partners presented to their research cohorts the environmental conflicts that they hoped could benefit from the methods and tools of ecological economics.

Over the next two days guidelines for case study descriptions were developed to support the case study development process. Equally important were discussions of the expectations CSO and research partners had of each other in terms of their own organisational goals, and of their own limitations with respect to these.