The European Citizens’ panels are the next step in making participatory democracy an integral part of the European legislative process, which is why the European Commission has Initiated three citizen panels that will be addressing issues within three separate topics – Food waste, virtual worlds, and learning mobility.

Putting citizens at the heart of European democracy 

After being a part of organizing the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) the world’s biggest experiment on citizen engagement, the Danish Board of Technology is now part of the next step for participatory democracy: The European Citizens’ Panels.  

These citizens’ panels are being established because the direct involvement of European residents proved to be a key benefit to the conference and couldn’t have been a success without them.  Ursula von der Leyen stated in her state of the union speech on 14th Sep 2022 that: “the Citizens’ Panels that were central to the Conference will now become a regular feature of EU’s democratic life”.  

Our role 

The Danish Board of Technology is a part of the organization of the panels, as well as the facilitation of the meetings along with the consortium partners; IFOK, Deliberativa, Missions Publiques, VO Europe. As contractors of the European Commission, the consortium designs the methodology, develops working documents for collaborative production of multilingual output like draft and final recommendations and coordinates with the many logistical partners involved, to bring the citizens to Brussels for their working sessions in the Commission buildings, set up the online working sessions and provide interpretation. The consortium also produces information material for the citizens in the panels in collaboration with a knowledge committee and provides access to acknowledged experts and stakeholders. Furthermore, the Danish Board of Technology and deliberative partners is responsible for main moderation of the panels as well as working group facilitation. 

The topics 

The European Citizens’ Panels focus on specific societal issues: Food waste, virtual worlds, and learning mobility. The first panel on Food Waste works on recommendations on what actions should be taken by EU Member States, actors in the food supply chain, citizens, and other private and public stakeholders in order to step up the effort to reduce food waste.

The topic of the second panel is virtual worlds, and citizens will be reflecting on the question “What vision, principles, and actions should guide the development of desirable and fair Virtual Worlds? “. Metaverses are foreseen to have a huge influence in our lives in the future, and the citizens’ panel will discuss good guiding principles for that.  

The third panel will be working with ‘learning mobility’ and put together recommendations on how to make learning mobility a reality for everyone in Europe. Learning mobility equals opportunities for students, staff, trainees, apprentices, youth workers, and people of life-long learning across Europe. 

The panels 

Each panel consists of 150 randomly selected EU residents from all 27 member states, representing the European population’s diversity. They are invited to debate the issues and challenges related to the panel topic and suggest what actions should be taken by the EU or the Member States Based on the panels’ work, final recommendations will be made for the European Commission to take into consideration when defining its policy and legislative initiatives.  

Timeline 

From mid-December 2022 until the end of April 2023, three panels of 150 randomly selected citizens from the 27 Member States will meet and formulate recommendations for the legislative processes on the topics of food waste, metaverse and learning mobility, some of the initiatives in the European Commission’s 2023 work programme.

Each panel will meet over three separate working sessions, where they will be introduced to the topic, learn about the issues at hand, and make decisions on what to focus on. In the end, they will make concrete suggestions and recommendations, that the EU Commission will take into consideration when defining its policy and legislative initiatives.  

Partners apart from DBT:

Missions Publiques, France

Deliberativa, Spain

Ifok, Germany

VO Europe, Belgium

Kantar Public, Australia