Involving Citizens on issues related to the European Green Deal. An overview of some significant experiences in Portugal and beyond.

Apresentação

The European Green Deal’s (EGD) transition pathway has been one of the major challenges for Europe since the start of the 21st century, taking into account the joint effort which is required to harmonise their very diverse contexts and the different stages concerning the EGD’s general goals. When dealing with environmental issues, participation is not just an option, but an absolute pre-condition for institutional policies and projects’ success. Behavioural changes and transformations in large populations’ lifestyles and expectations are vital during the EGD’s implementation. The consensus on adopted measures has proven to be indispensable for actively involving all stakeholders in this effort. Moreover, the pursuit of a new holistic vision of sustainability requires an in-depth analysis of different conceptions of human/other-than-human relations, which pinpoint the complexity underneath the paradigm of “just transition” embedded in the EGD.

Several academic observers, as well as social movements and citizens organisations in the last years have questions some ambiguities and incoherence of the measures which are being put in practice to implement the EGD goals. The recently started project called “PHOENIX – The Rise of Citizens’ Voices for a Greener Europe” is interested in bridging these voices with those of methodological experts who are working in other contexts to increase and enrich the quality of the methodologies used for promoting participatory and deliberative processes, which can involve citizens in discussing some of the complex issues within the broad framework of the European Green Deal. Taking advantage of the presence in Lisbon of several members of the international consortium of the “PHOENIX project”, the Centre for Social studies of Coimbra University – in collaboration with other partners and the CIUL of Lisbon Municipality, would like to propose an event, open to a larger public, to make some Portuguese experiences meet other international practices.

PHOENIX moves from the acknowledgement that the accumulated tradition of participatory processes and refined deliberative methodologies (which have been experimented with, successfully when dealing with other thematic clusters of policy-making), constitute necessary tools – but not sufficient ones – when it comes to facing the most ambitious goals related to ecological transition patterns. Collecting and elaborating on “lesson learned” is a fundamental exercise, which requires a specific contextualisation to respond to the peculiar challenges of this cross-sectoral field of action. In this perspective, it is important to acknowledge the existence of several movements and advocacy actions which propose different modes of mobilising citizens for discussing complex issue related to ecological/environmental topics. This event wants to be the start of a dialogue between different methodological perspectives and repertoires of struggles that will grow in the next years, also in relation to the pilot-experiments that the Phoenix project proposed in Portugal as in other European countries.

Open event. No registration required, limited to room capacity.

—————–

“PHOENIX – The Rise of Citizens’ Voices for a Greener Europe” is a project funded by the Horizon 20220 program, that will run between 2022 and 2025 (for 42 months) and considers that citizen engagement is vital to ensure the transition towards a climate-neutral society. In this context, the project will develop a process to increase the transformative potential of democratic innovations to address particular areas of the European Green Deal (with particular attention to energy, food sovereignty, circular economy). It will tailor and test enriched democratic innovations in 11 pilots in 7 countries at different administrative scales and within a wide range of socio-cultural and environmental contexts. The project will also support the mainstreaming, scalability and adaptability of the methodologies tested in the pilots.