_This post is written by Ângela Guimarães Pereira, Mateusz Tokarski, and Tessa Dunlop, who work at the Joint Research Centre for the European Commission's work on citizen engagement. _

It is the third in a series highlighting their work supporting EU policy.

  • The problem: Representative democracy is under real pressure and new ways to engage citizens to better understand, frame and solve policy problems are needed.
  • **Why it matters: **Top-down approaches risk ‘solving’ the wrong problems if situated and local knowledge is ignored.
  • The solution: Investment and support for programmes that engage citizens in a meaningful way in addressing the issues that matter to them, through co-creation and deliberative practices.

Despite concerns about the erosion of democracy (a rise in extremism, political polarisation, online disinformation and politically manipulated information, and a growing distance between citizens and elected representatives, to name a few), there is cause for optimism. Initiatives and practices that strengthen democracy by involving citizens more directly in the policymaking process, including citizens’ assemblies, citizen juries, and deliberation, are flourishing.

In Europe alone we’ve seen abortion reform in Ireland thanks to Citizens’ Assemblies, while there is now a standing citizen’s assembly in Paris and a permanent Citizens’ Council in Ostbelgien, Belgium. This year has seen Europe’s largest ever deliberative event, the Conference on the Future of Europe. Globally, the number of representative deliberative processes and institutions registered by the OECD has reached almost 600, with nearly half of these registered in the database since 2019. Another database, Participedia registers around 2,000 examples of different formats of participatory activities with citizens.

Since Porto Alegre in 1985, participatory budgeting exercises at different scales, have spread across the world. What these initiatives all have in common is that they allow citizens’ voices to be heard beyond election time, providing people with an opportunity to more directly shape policy. And there is demand for more. Much more. But with a social and political momentum to launch these processes, the key challenge now is to ensure that we have enough capacity, tools and resources for their implementation.

Power to the people

A recommendation that came out of the European Citizens’ Panels of the Conference on the Future of Europe is that EU citizens want more citizens’ assemblies – and for them to be enshrined in law: “We recommend that the European Union holds Citizens’ Assemblies. We strongly recommend that they are developed through a legally binding and compulsory law or regulation. […] The EU must ensure the commitment of politicians to citizens' decisions taken in Citizens’ Assemblies. In case citizens' proposals are ignored or explicitly rejected, EU institutions must be accountable for it, justifying the reasons why this decision was made”.

The push by citizens to participate more in the decision-making process complements findings made by researchers and practitioners – that citizen input through participatory and deliberative practices is crucial to strengthen democracy, and very much needed in our complex world full of expanding wicked problems. There is now ample evidence showing that citizens provide substantial contributions to the policymaking processes, offering their knowledge, creativity and experience often missing at the higher levels of abstraction at which science and policymaking often work.

And this is being recognised on a political level. Greater involvement of citizens in decision-making is one of the priority areas of the current European Commission. Key initiatives developed under the "New push for European democracy" include the Conference on the Future of Europe and the European Democracy Action Plan. Engaging with citizens is expected to play an increasing role in the Commission’s policies. Participatory processes are already integral to policies such as the EU Missions to tackle Europe’s major challenges and the Cohesion policy to improve the economic well-being of EU regions. The Summit for Democracy, held for the first time in 2021, could be a future global venue to advance participatory governance, innovate our democracies, and counteract their current problems.

Finding a way forward

But with the social and political will to implement such practices, is there a way? There is a risk that the social and political momentum to institute more participatory policy could lose steam without the proper tools, resources and investment with which to implement change on the scale and depth that is necessary. The next big step is to build the infrastructure and capacity to mainstream participatory practices across political institutions, countries and regions. This is why the European Commission’s new Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy is a particularly significant development.

Building on 30 years of work on citizen engagement, the new Centre signals the Commission’s desire to consolidate expertise and equip itself with the tools necessary to engage citizens in policymaking processes at scale. The Competence Centre is one of a group of dedicated Joint Research Centre knowledge and competence centres that aim to strengthen the bridge between science and policy. They are virtual interfaces where policymakers and practitioners can find specialised expertise in cross-cutting research areas.

Citizens provide substantial contributions to the policymaking processes, offering their knowledge, creativity and experience often missing at the higher levels of abstraction at which science and policymaking often work.

The Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy, then, is advancing innovation in this area at the citizen-science-policy interface by researching participatory and deliberative methods across different levels of governance. At the EU institutional level, we are developing the scaffolding to facilitate these processes in-house, with guidance, training, tools and other resources. The Competence Centre is designed to not only help better connect policymakers and researchers from inside, and outside the EU. It is also a place to experiment and trial new techniques which are still lacking in the field.

In practice, the work of the Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy centres around five main pillars:

  • **Policy guidance: **Providing tools and resources for researchers and policymakers for policy that is fit for purpose; including advice and hands-on support to policymakers to co-design and manage their participatory processes. The guidance includes the evaluation of citizen engagement and deliberative democracy processes, including the extent to which these are being mainstreamed across the EU and the impact they have on policymaking.
  • **Capacity building: **Strengthening capacity in citizen engagement practices and participatory governance both at EU institutional level and in EU countries through training and dedicated coaching sessions.
  • **Experimentation: Trialling and developing new methodologies **for citizen engagement through various spaces including the physical JRC Makerspace and Collaborative Space.
  • **Knowledge repository: **Maintaining a database of citizen engagement organisations and projects in the EU, as well as tools to engage citizens in science and policymaking and research that informs these processes.
  • Community and networking:** Fostering the Competence Centre’s Community of Practice to connect policymakers, practitioners and researchers through projects, events and the annual Public Participation and Deliberative Democracy Festival.**

The mission of the Competence Centre, however, goes further than the provision of tools and resources. Its overarching goal is the development and promotion of a new way of working at the Commission – one that sees citizens as partners and collaborators throughout the policymaking cycle. Far from limiting the engagement of citizens to the implementation stage, the Centre promotes the incorporation of values, expectations, contextual knowledge and imagination of citizens from the very framing of problems all the way to the final evaluation stages. In other words, the aim of the Competence Centre is for everybody who is working on policy, and starts by thinking: “how are we going to involve citizens in our policy file?”.

Its overarching goal is the development and promotion of a new way of working at the Commission – one that sees citizens as partners and collaborators throughout the policymaking cycle.

As such, the ultimate task is to change the culture of policymaking. What is refreshing and heartening is that there is real political commitment behind these efforts: “This new Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy shows the European Commission’s determination to engage with citizens on the issues that matter to them”, said Dubravka Šuica, the Commission Vice-President for Democracy and Demography, who also leads the Commission’s work on deliberative democracy.

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