A Peoples’ Assembly for Europe

The Democratic Odyssey team meets with Dubravka Šuica, the European Commission’s Vice-President for Democracy and Demography, to discuss the future of citizen participation in the EU.

On Wednesday 29 November, Dubravka Šuica, Vice-President for Democracy and Demography at the European Commission, will engage with the community of the Democratic Odyssey project to discuss the achievements of the Conference on the Future of Europe, the next generation citizen panels (ECPs) and future prospects for citizen participation in EU policymaking – both in the next Commission’s agenda, and in the European Parliament’s proposed Citizen Agoras.

Participants will explore how the Democratic Odyssey’s ‘middle way’ process (involving civil, society, academia and citizens in agenda-setting, as well as institutional actors) can help top-down and bottom-up dynamics converge in future experiments with transnational deliberation.

The conversation will be guided by Vice-President Šuica’s experience and knowledge of the field at the European Commission. Her keynote will be followed by a conversation with the Democratic Odyssey team, interventions from MEPs and practitioners and a Q&A with the public.

Led by the Florence School of Transnational Governance, the Democratic Odyssey is a crowdsourced, decentralised and collaborative campaign developing a concept and strategy to institutionalise a permanent peoples’ assembly and participatory eco-system in the European Union.

By building on lessons learned from the Conference on the Future of Europe (COFE) and other deliberative experiments, we are organising a randomly selected, transnational peoples’ assembly as a prototype for an EU-wide European Peoples’ Assembly. Our aim is to showcase how citizen participation can be enacted in all stages of the EU’s policy processes, from agenda setting and legislative initiative to co-legislation and even constitutional Treaty Change – all while amplifying the democratic potential of these experiments in the broader public sphere.

Please join us by registering with the link below (in person or hybrid): https://apps.eui.eu/EventRegistration/Home/Login?eventId=565457