EU-CIEMBLY

Objectives

The project addresses the need for the introduction of new forms of citizens’ participation and deliberation in EU political life and, particularly, an EU Citizens’ Assembly whose design and implementation fully tackles the issues of intersectionality, inclusiveness, and equality.

While there has been an admirable appetite to improve the landscape of participatory and deliberative democratic mechanisms at the EU level, this has not always been accompanied by adequate considerations of how to build these mechanisms to ensure the avoidance of intersectional discrimination and the exclusion of vulnerable groups of citizens. The time is ripe to create a new participatory tool with intersectionality at the forefront.

This project will provide the analytical framework and the prototype through which such a tool can be created in the form of a Citizens’ Assembly that can be established at the EU level and with features allowing for the transfer of a prototype to the national and local levels of EU Member States.

The project consortium is led by the Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal and includes, in addition to ECAS, the following partners:

• Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain)
• University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg (South Africa)
• Institute for Methods Innovation (Ireland)
• ASPON Consulting Ltd (Cyprus)
• Università degli Studi di Bergamo (Italy)
• The Research Trust of Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand)
• University of Waikato (New Zealand)
• Make.org (France)

• Conduct a review, at both EU and Member State levels, of existing forms of mini-publics, including Citizens’ Assemblies and their EU equivalent.
• Collaborate on the identification and management of the technical and practical elements of three pilot Citizens’ Assemblies.
• Prepare and deliver training to the facilitators and participants in the three pilot Assemblies as well as the material to be distributed.
• Support the piloting and evaluation of the three model Citizens’ Assemblies: two pilots at local and national levels, in hybrid format, and one at the EU level, online.
• Carry out dissemination at the EU level through direct EU advocacy and a final multiplier event in Brussels, the EU-CIEMBLY Final Conference.
• Contribute to the production and dissemination of an online, interdisciplinary and multilingual publication gathering the main relevant conclusions and results of the project.