The Festival is in its third edition and this year will be entirely hosted online because of the COVID19 situation. The festival will first and foremost support on-going Commission citizen engagement initiatives.

In light of the COVID-19 emergency and its inherent uncertainties, it is ever more crucial that the Commission keeps on nurturing the establishment of the necessary infrastructure to engage citizens in co-creative and deliberative ways on EU policy making. This festival will address the question, how can we make best use of such processes in the crisis and post-crisis situations, such as the one we are living now? How can we ensure that physical distance does not prevent the publics to engage, co-create or deliberate policies that affect them? How can we make the best use of online tools?

Therefore, this festival is a timely key moment for the Commission to continue advancing the talk (and walk) about mainstreaming citizen engagement and deliberation in policy matters in the Commission in particular, and within public administration in general. It is about catching an existing wave, which the current crises made more urgent and positioning the Commission as a key player in these participatory styles of governance.

Encouraged by the political context and building on the ambition to contribute further to implement these practices across the Commission policy cycle, as well as, the success of the last editions of Festival of Citizen Engagement, the 3rd Festival has the following objectives:

• Showcase current ongoing important files of citizen engagement run by the Commission by relevant services, notably COFE, not only as a way to give visibility to the Conference itself and engaging the European deliberative community in COFE, but also make visible the digital infrastructure in COFE;
• Illustrate why greater engagement of the public is even more needed now than it was before the outbreak of Covid-19 in politics and policy-making;
• In view of the Better Regulation package, further strengthen and widen across the Commission the understanding of the role of citizen engagement in all phases of the policy cycle, especially focusing on co-creation and deliberative practices;
• Showcase other citizen engagement that other services of the Commission are organising such as the co-design of HE Missions;
• In view of the Commission’s 6th priority, showcase deliberative democracy practices in Member States and in particular youth engagement projects;
• Address some cross-cutting challenges including methodological issues with practitioners in the field;
• Contribute to capacity building about online citizen engagement tools, providing dedicated seminars and hands-on experiences with tools and methodologies of citizen engagement.

Finally, the 3rd Festival will invite discussion with different practitioners not only about possible political and practical futures of citizen engagement and deliberative democracy. It will run over a week and include a set of asynchronous and synchronous events focused on the pressing issues of our current times and the futures they may imply.

The festival is open to anyone that is interested to attend it. Registration is required to attend the festival.

Link: https://academy.europa.eu/courses/european-citizen-engagement-and-deliberative-democracy-festival/