Institutionalising e-Participation in Europe?

Krems.
The next session at CeDEM 2011 starts with Francesco Molinari. His interest is in the processes of institutionalising e-participation in Europe. There is an enormous amount of information, evidence, and outcomes from a wide range of e-participation projects in the EU – how can we learn from them and develop more systematic approaches within European and member state institutions? What role does the researcher and practitioner community play in this?

The story begins with the EU e-participation Preparatory Action, which set up 30 pilot sites in 18 EU member states and engaged 100,000 citizens. 50 public sector entities were involved, and 70 MEPs took part as well. The overall investment was €20m, so that’s about €200 per participating citizen. Per pilot, an average of 3,300 citizens took part (or 2,000 per public sector entity, or 1,400 per MEP). These activities also created some economic impact, creating a market for leading innovative technologies.

But what was the policy impact? How can we avoid reinventing the wheel in the future? We need a normative approach, which has significant implications for e-participation theory as well. This is a question of institutionalising e-participation approaches, and may need to take an action research approach, with research into policy sustainability and actions directed at specific e-participation examples.

Such examples include the Parterre project (which pursues planning consultations and electronic townhall meetings): drivers of institutionalisation include legislative frameworks (on urban planning, strategic environmental assessment, and the digitisation of public participation), and business models requiring institutions to do more work with less funding.

Another project is Periphèria: this aims to funnel innovation from the business to the public administration environment, and to connect internal innovation with citizen participation; and then to generate a series of pilot projects and further dissemination. Key features are behavioural transformation, multiplication (or network) effects, and sustainability (all informed by relevant research, of course).

Why institutionalise such projects, though? First, it could give rise to a truly European sociopolitical model that may also be exported elsewhere, integrating the role of law with social innovation and organisational efficiency. EU ministers in charge of these processes already agree – pursuing coordination, sustainability, and local specificity –, but there has not been any follow-up to the statement of these lofty goals yet.

‘E-participation’ is pursued in principle, but what we need a two-pronged strategy that focusses on scaling up from small and local to larger and more regional or national projects (and thereby to stimulate the nascent market for e-participation solutions, too), and that aims to embed e-participation as a permanent add-on in public decision-making processes (thus exploring and assessing the conditions that make e-participation sustainable).

We may need an EU-wide repository of best practice that also provides intelligent benchmarking of projects; an observatory of European e-democracy trends; and a pan-European e-democracy forum (gathering experts from various domains for sustained exchange and discussion).