Reinventing Engagement through Affirmative Citizen Consultations

ended

This project aims to strengthen citizen participation on the European policy issues. In the first phase of the project, partner organisations will implement local citizens’ consultation events that follow a common deliberative protocol. These events aim to reveal people’s understanding, aspirations, and narratives within and across three interrelated policy fields - environment, EU accession, and the rule of law, and identify trade-offs and synergies at the intersection between these realms. To empower youth often excluded from decision-making processes, the MladiRini youth portal will focus specifically on collecting their written contributions. The second phase of the project will bring citizens’ delegates from the local events together with expert community in national-level citizen consultation events to deliberate on how trade-offs and potential synergies previously identified by citizens can be translated into policy decisions, plans, and strategies. Following the organisation of national events, each project partner will compose the national-level publication, showcasing the most important findings from citizen events. These publications will take centre stage at a Transnational event in Belgrade, where all project partners, as well as citizen delegates from national events and policy stakeholders, will engage in a constructive dialogue about their experiences with citizen consultations within respective countries and the policy solutions proposed. Following the Transnational Event, all national publications will feed into a comprehensive Transnational Volume, which will serve as a repository of insights and experiences from the local, national, and transnational events. This Transnational Volume will be presented at a final conference in Brussels, where event delegates, national-level stakeholders, and EU policy experts will discuss the project and its results.