Just spoke at the #clubofvenice / @cap_com event here in beautiful @Toulouse @Occitanie. A few points from my notes on the topic of “placing the citizen at the centre of European debate” in this thread.
1. Citizens don’t always know that they are in a European debate. They come into all sorts of conversations with their own expectations and experience, and don’t know (and shouldn’t need to know) which level of government is responsible for what.
2. Policy makers come into European debate thinking about specific policies and reforms. That’s fine, but there needs to be two way interpretation between the connection, complex human stories that citizens bring and the organisationally-structured questions of institutions.
3. This argues for a connected approach that allows for ideas to come from the bottom up and the top down, and for local conversations to be federated into European ones, and European information to be better used in local conversations.
4. Civil society orgs can help with that. Locally, they provide the associative infrastructure and the trusted local voices that can ensure that participation reaches out wider. They also can run democratic processes themselves, so participation isn’t always about …
…politics and partisan issues but everyday life as well.
5. Internationally, civil society can provide networks of learning and support and trusted external validation for processes.
6. But civil society also has needs, most of all for stability of resources. That’s not just about cash – we also need trained facilitators available locally, good information that we don’t have to design ourselves but is well-tailored to citizen needs.
7. And finally we need the security that enables us to hire and train for the long-term rather than just 12- or 24-month contracts.
8. Long-term participation is only going to be possible if we are able to hold on to participants to update them, train and validate facilitators and designers to ensure that processes can run well and be started at short notice.
9. And that requires us as civil society to work closer together, but also governments at every level to think about how they can support this whole space in a holistic way.
10. Funding for orgs like @demsoc will always be triangular – foundational (European grants, foundations, other big patient resources); project-based (quasi-commercial); and members. At the moment too much focus is on the second point in the triangle.
11. Horizon Europe is promising in its focus on democracy but even with several million euro it’s still just one funder among many – we really need to think about how we can connect up the initiatives – and better connect up the networks that help deliver it.
