[FR] Citizen consultations: it’s up to you!

From 4 to 6 May 2018, a citizens’ panel representing the inhabitants of the European Union (EU) met in Brussels under the auspices of the European Commission to discuss the future of the EU and draw up the questionnaire that all EU countries are now distributing. At a time when citizen consultations are flourishing across Europe, it is up to the institutions and civil society to live up to the ambitions of this initiative. Guarantees must be given that they will be translated into action, as discussed in a previous blog post, but it is now a question of offering European citizens a genuine space for expression and the development of collective intelligence, ensuring that consultations are held throughout Europe so that they are representative, and making them truly European consultations.

The primary objective of these consultations is to identify the priorities, concerns and ideas of citizens across Europe, which will feed into the roadmap of European leaders for the Europe of tomorrow. They cannot therefore be content with offering citizens the opportunity to participate in traditional debates, during which panellists, politicians or experts give presentations on which a few questions are asked by the most knowledgeable members of the audience at the end of the session. The stated objective of the Consultation Secretariat in France is that citizen debate should occupy the majority of the event, otherwise it cannot be labelled a citizen consultation. However, people with expertise on the EU should not be excluded from consultations that they can contribute to in a meaningful way. It is simply necessary to train facilitators, as well as experts on the topics addressed during the consultations, in facilitation techniques and the development of collective intelligence, in order to ensure the inclusiveness and interactivity of the consultations, but also to increase the creativity and substance of the diagnoses and proposals that will emerge from them, not to mention that these methods and tools will greatly simplify the work of synthesis for the organising structures.

While the organisation of each debate must ensure that it is as inclusive as possible, this requirement is just as crucial at the level of the Member States and Europe with regard to their territories. Consultations must take place in urban centres as well as in rural areas, in border areas as well as in the centre of each EU country. This is essential to the legitimacy of any actions that may be taken on the basis of the analysis and recommendations resulting from these consultations. It is also important to ensure that all topics – the consultation specifications propose six: Prosperity and employment in Europe; Sustainable development in Europe; Security in Europe; Europe in the world; Innovation in Europe; Unity of Europe – can be discussed in all territories, without falling into clichés that would lead to talking only about agriculture in rural areas and innovation in cities at the forefront of digital technology.

Finally, the final challenge for these consultations lies in their Europeanisation. The European Commission has demonstrated its willingness to make the process, which is currently very intergovernmental, as European as possible by holding a two-day citizen consultation that resulted in both a common questionnaire distributed throughout Europe and a framework for reporting on the consultations that will be conducted in each country, which should make it possible to compare a number of points in the results of each national consultation. Beyond the European Commission’s initiatives, transnational actors, particularly within civil society, can seize this opportunity to organise cross-border and multinational consultations, inviting citizens from different countries to come together to express their views on various issues that know no borders.

Many are sceptical about what can be gained from these citizen consultations, and their doubts are often understandable and even well-founded. Nevertheless, these consultations offer civil society the opportunity to organise a new kind of debate, to give a voice to citizens across Europe, to build collective and inclusive intelligence, and to draw from the both massive in number and qualitative in its methods, these consultations can provide legitimacy and real leverage to advance a number of issues at the European level, by empowering leaders who have committed themselves to listening to the voice of European citizens and translating it into action. It’s up to us!