Europe’s People´s Forum welcomes very much the announcement by the three European institutions – the Council of Ministers, the European Parliament and the European Commission – that a joint declaration has been agreed and the Conference on the Future of Europe can move forward.
We note with pleasure that many of our recommendations to the three institutions have been reflected in the overall methodology. Particularly we are pleased that the quality of the policy proposals developed by the citizens through careful deliberation in the European thematic agora will have a possibility to build on also national level deliberations and online inputs.
The time for the Conference is limited to one year. This makes it very important that the agenda for the Conference can be decided very quickly through citizens’ online priorities.
It also makes it very important to compensate the limited time by closely linking the deliberative processes in the national panels with the processes in the European thematic agora deliberations. Both levels are demographically, and socioeconomically representative and thematic and random selection of participants and development of policy recommendations can benefit from each other. By linking the online, the national and the European agoras together, proposals are prioritized online, further considered at national level and with a very focused discussion on detailing the proposals at the European level.
Europe’s People’s Forum, its more than 27 technical partners and more than 60 civil society organisations as partners all over Europe will be ready to help making the best possible use of the time available for the conference.
We believe that the Conference on the Future of Europe will be the first step of engaging citizens in European policy making between the elections.
Lithuanian College of Democracy is a member of Europe’s People´s Forum. The forum is implemented by the international non-profit organization Europe’s People’s Forum (EPF), registered in Denmark, in collaboration with tentatively more than 50 active organizations from the 27 EU member states.
europespeoplesforum.eu information