European Citizens’ Consultations |
 |
 |
 |
|
The European Citizens’ Consultations are an initiative conceived to develop genuine pan-EU debate between citizens of all Member States, on issues concerning EU society. Forty international partners are involved in running them led by the Belgian King Baudouin (KBF) Foundation, and they have been running each year since 2006. They have the long term aim of developing a feasible consultation tool which will provide the EU institutions with meaningful, representative input directly from citizens on key points on the European agenda.
Last week the European Policy Centre, a think tank, held a policy dialogue on the consultations, to try to see if they could really be an effective tool to address the EU’s major democratic deficit. Gerrit Rauws of the KBF said that so far the consultations have been pilot projects which have not necessarily been aiming to have a formal impact on policy, but see if they are feasible and can have useful meaningful results, to see if it is a legitimate process in formulating political decisions. He thought the last years’ experience shows that they are.
The dialogue was attended by Viviane Reding, Vice President of the European Commission, whose dossier takes in both citizenship and communication. She spoke of her aim to encourage citizens to see themselves as stakeholders in the EU and its decision making process. She underlined the importance of the EU showing that it has really listened to citizens when they express themselves in these kinds of exercise. If citizens go to the trouble of participating and then cannot see what change in thinking their views have led to, they will experience frustration and become even more disengaged.
The main feature of the policy dialogue was a panel discussion between different actors who have been involved in the consultation. Among them was Monique Leyenaar, Professor of Comparative Politics, at Radboud University, Nijmegen (NL), who was part of a team of researchers studying the 2009 consultation to assess the legitimacy of its results, and the feasibility of using such a tool on a regular basis in forming EU policy. Her conclusions were overwhelmingly positive.
Different criteria were used to assess the quality of the consultative process. “Internal” and “external fairness” were measures of the legitimacy of the process, checking that relevant groups in society could participate equally and that participants felt that they were able to take a full part in the debates. The competence of the participants and impact of participating on overall attitude to EU were also measured. In general the majority of the participants were pessimistic - 57% didn't think they could influence decision makers. On the other hand, 91% said they had learned more about the EU and how it functioned while 95% said opinion about EU had changed through participation.
Also on the panel was Kinga Göncz a socialist MEP from Hungary who is the Vice Chair, Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs in the European Parliament. She built on these findings by saying that an important result of the consultations is that citizens see that their view is not the only one, because they will hear that not only politicians but also other citizens have opposing views. She hoped that they would then understand the difficult task of making a compromise between the different, and understand why decisions cannot therefore simply reflect the view of one party to the debate.
Ms Göncz said there is a burning need to have more citizen consultation of policy issues, and that more specific questions should be posed to get focused answers which are then easier to use and to incorporate into policy direction. This may be true, but it is important also to balance the need for focussed questions with the need to ensure that citizens can orient the debate towards what is genuinely important to them, so that the EU institutions do not frame the terms of the debate in a way that doesn't correspond to the real experience of citizens.
Sophie Beernaerts, is Head of the unit dealing with "Citizenship Policy - Europe for citizens", at the European Commission’s Communication department. She argued that consultations should be rolled out across EU policy making because they have good effects on “ownership” or the level of attachment felt by the citizens at large for the policies and decisions which then emerge from Brussels. She echoed Ms Reding’s view that the EU must bear in mind, that if the views emerging from such consultations and deliberations are not taken into account, it will lead to frustration and have a contrary effect.
Afterwards, the floor was opened to questions and comments from the audience. One questioner worried about the cost and extra workload for the Commission, saying that it was not a good use of public money. He said that in this kind of system anyone is able to launch an idea, and then the Commission has to listen to it and treat it with seriousness, whether or not it is a good idea. Ms Beernaerts replied that, a high work load was implied. However, if we care about participation, she said, and we want to prioritise it, then we have to cut money away from something else in the situation where we have finite resources.
A Swedish journalist said that the panel seemed to think that these consultations could identify the "real" views of the citizens, whereas polls, another way of supposedly measuring public opinion, tend to give completely different responses. “Who is right?” she asked. Mr Rauws replied that the difference between a poll and a consultation is that the poll takes the opinion of a random sample of citizens, of whom many are uninformed on the issue at hand, whereas the deliberative method involved in the consultation gauges the opinions of citizens informed by debate. Neither is right or wrong and both measures have their problems. They give different types of complementary information which is why both are useful to policy makers, he said.
The panel concluded that the process of citizens consultations has proven its worth and usefulness over several years, and that the next step is to focus on convincing operational policy departments in the European Commission – in particular the people who control financing – to really implement consultations like this, working on specific policy issues.
If you would like to receive the EPC conference report, or the full CEDAG notes from this conference, please get in touch. |