Citizen Participation Playbook in Emilia-Romagna
Project goals
Around one-third of the European Union’s budget is dedicated to cohesion policy, which promotes and supports the overall harmonious development of its Member States and regions. The success of this investment relies on effective partnerships among governments, stakeholders, and citizens. Citizens have a key role to play in shaping decisions on public investment, as well as in making public authorities more transparent and accountable.
From July 2020 to December 2021, the European Commission and the OECD partnered to explore how five national or regional authorities across Europe, Emilia-Romagna Region included, could place citizens at the centre of their European funds programming decisions.
Emilia-Romagna’s participation
The project started by doing an overview of possible applications of citizen participation to the new regional programmes for European funding. Innovative ways of involving citizens and civil society in the implementation of cohesion policy were explored, with focus on local territorial development strategies - a process that can be applied both on urban cities and inner areas. Representatives of the regional four Inner Areas and representatives from the Local Units supervising the activities of the Open Laboratory Network were included to share instruments and methodologies of citizens engagement, such as representative deliberative process, participants panel selection, to the role of the communication and its strategies, all of these to guarantee efficient participation process in creating public value. One of the Emilia-Romagna Region final goals was to engage all the networks, stakeholders, and partners but also subjects excluded so far - people who do not belong to structured organisations, socially isolated persons or people with financial, social and/or employment difficulties.
Project results
At the end of the co-designing process under the guide of OECD experts, a Citizen Participation Playbook for Emilia-Romagna was created to help identify opportunities and plan for citizen participation in designing, implementing, and evaluating the Territorial Development Strategies (part of the Regional Programme 2021-2027) under Cohesion Policy. The Playbook helps the public administration to identify conditions when citizen participation is useful, the different steps that should be taken in order to implement a citizen participation process, the preconditions for engagement of quality and the follow-up as well as different methods and instruments to be used according to the objective and the current environment. In addition to the Playbook, the OECD provided suggestions on how to best use the regional digital platform for citizen participation.