Study on the Citizens’ Panels as part of the Conference on the Future of Europe
Publication date: 29 März 2024 | Report language: EN
The objective of Citizens Panels was to allow, by way of a citizens-focused, bottom-up exercise, European citizens to have a say on what they expect from the European Union and an active role in shaping the future of the European Union. Overall, this study finds that it was successful in meeting these objectives, with lessons learnt and room for improvement in future exercises.
This study aimed to:
- monitor and evaluate the inclusiveness, effectiveness and impact of European Citizens’ Panels in the framework of the Conference on the Future of Europe
- assess the satisfaction of participants with the organisation and the process
- provide the Commission and its partners in the organisation of the Panels, evidence on how deliberative methods can improve citizens’ participation in EU policymaking and identify recommendations on how to enhance their added value in future policymaking processes.
- reinforce the accountability of the Conference exercise.
As a transnational, multilingual and interinstitutional exercise of deliberative democracy, the European Citizen Panels were a highly innovative experiment in deliberative democracy in terms of both the scale (first at the scale of the European Union) and the methodology (in particular, large-scale multilingualism). The Conference on the Future of Europe, including the Citizens Panels, involved thousands of European citizens, as well as political actors, social partners civil society representatives and key stakeholders.
In terms of specific objectives, the Panels succeeded in recruiting a sample of approximately 800 citizens (split in four Panels of almost 200 people each) to meet and discuss the future of Europe during three sessions held between September 2021 and January 2022. These Panels achieved their aim of making policy recommendations on the main topics of the Conference, which were presented, and discussed at the Plenaries of the Conference and fed into the final deliberations.
