About the project
European Citizens’ Consultations on the EU’s economic and social future
In the run-up to the 2009 Euro-elections, the European Citizens’ Consultations 2009 (ECC 2009) are giving citizens a voice in the debate over how to respond to the current economic and financial crisis by providing a platform for pan-European dialogue on the challenges facing the EU.
In the first phase of the project, some 200,000 European citizens have visited the online fora launched in each of the EU’s 27 Member States in December 2008 to generate public debate and ideas on what role the EU can play in shaping our economic and social future in a globalised world. These ideas are being fed into the national consultations now taking place in all 27 Member States, over three weekends, at which a total of 1,600 citizens - chosen at random using professional opinion research institutes - are working to produce ten recommendations for action at EU level at each national event. All the participants will then be asked to vote on all the recommendations generated by these events to choose their top 15 recommendations.
Some 150 citizens who took part in the national events will then travel to Brussels for the European Citizens’ Summit on May 10-11 to hand over and discuss these recommendations with top EU policy-makers, including the European Commission and Parliament Presidents and the EU Presidency.
As well as feeding into the debate over how to respond to the global economic crisis, ECC 2009 will also provide timely and relevant input for policy-makers as the EU institutions begin work on a post-2010 successor to the Lisbon Agenda. Additional regional outreach activities are also planned in the autumn, with a particular focus on the MEPs newly elected in June 2009, to ensure that the results of the consultations are disseminated and debated more widely.
ECC 2009 is part of an ongoing process to further develop citizen participation and consultation mechanisms. It builds on the success of ECC 2007, which established a new model for citizen participation through the first pan-European participatory project to involve citizens from all 27 Member States of the EU in the debate on the future of Europe.
At the heart of the ECC process are randomly-selected participants, representing the diversity of the population, providing valuable qualitative input into the EU debate by discussing the issues and generating ideas for action themselves. This complements and adds to the information provided by traditional opinion polls, consultation processes with organised stakeholder groups etc.
ECC 2009 has six objectives:
- Promoting interaction between citizens and policy-makers: fostering debate between citizens and policy-makers in the run-up to – and after - the European elections;
- Citizens as policy advisors: feeding citizens’ opinions into the political debate at both European and national levels;
- Citizen participation as a policy instrument of the future: mainstreaming trend-setting and long-term oriented citizen consultations at the European level;
- Closing the gap between the EU and its citizens: bringing the EU closer to citizens and citizens closer to the EU;
- Increasing the general public’s interest in the EU: generating substantial media coverage of the dialogue between the EU and its citizens;
- Partnerships in participation: deepening European co-operation within existing civil society networks and their respective partner networks, as well as e-participation providers
The European Citizens' Consultations are conducted by a unique consortium of more than 40 European partner oganisations, led by the King Baudouin Foundation (KBF), and co-funded by the European Commission under its “Debate Europe” programme, and foundations including the King Baudouin Foundation, Compagnia di San Paolo, the Robert Bosch Foundation, ING and funders at national level. They are being organised under the patronage of the European Parliament.
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