REAL DEAL

The EU-funded project REAL DEAL explored new pathways to enhance citizen participation around the European Green Deal with an interdisciplinary team bridging academia, civil society organisations and practitioners. Researchers collaborated with the EU´s largest civil society networks and NGOs to reach millions of citizens and hundreds of policymakers. The project provided an analysis and selection of criteria, processes, concepts and formats that are needed for meaningful, effective, representative, inclusive, gender-sensitive, youth sensitive and impactful citizens' participation and deliberation in the context of the European Green Deal (EGD) and its wider sustainable development objectives. On this basis, the project selected participatory and deliberative formats for empirical implementation to support the sustainability transformations envisaged by the EGD. These formats and their combinations, together with innovative methods (both in person and digital) were implemented in test cases at EU level and in 13 European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Ukraine). The main assumption was that there is no 'one size fits all', as different formats serve different purposes of citizens' and stakeholder participation and deliberation. The project combined Citizen Assemblies and similar type events with Round Tables, Group Delphis and Focus Groups in the test cases with the aim to investigate the performance of these formats and their combinations at national and EU level. It also experimented with methods like civic arts for enhancing participation and deliberation. Feminist moderation techniques were applied and a respective course developed. Both civil society organisations and democracy practitioners supported the preparation and conduction of the cases. The three main topics of the test cases were:

• Food systems and agriculture
• Economics: wellbeing economy, consumption, intergenerational justice, European Semester
• Climate change, air quality, obility.

In addition to research activities assessing current state-of-the-art approaches towards deliberative democracy, the REAL DEAL project set up a Civil Society Forum for Sustainability (CSF), which supported the aim of the project to bring together actors from the sustainability and the democracy arenas. The CSF reflected on the approaches in the project, produced important input from the policy perspective and held discussions with policy makers. The project developed a multilingual online platform used for the testcases and the CSF, which was also linked to Europe-wide mobilisation and narrative change campaigns. Based on all findings, REAL DEAL co-created a comprehensive Protocol Guidance and Toolkit (PGT) for stakeholder and citizen deliberation on the implementation of the EGD. First steps are taken towards a 'Citizen Deliberation Academy' as a follow-up activity of the project. RIFS lead the research consortium and implemented the project in cooperation with the European Environmental Bureau (EEB). The Institute also lead Work Package 1, in which the scientific foundations for the test phase was developed, and played a key role in the planning and conduction of the test cases, as well as the elaboration of the protocol.

More information: Factsheets about the key test in seven European countries (Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia) and three cases at EU level. Protocol, Guidance and Toolkit on stakeholder and citizen deliberation for the EGD. This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 101037071.