Evaluating citizen engagement processes in EU policymaking: What works or what matters?

The Lisbon Treaty, Article 8 A.3, is foundational for the state of democracy and democratic governance in the European Union (EU), having stated that “Every citizen shall have the right to participate in the democratic life of the Union. Decisions shall be taken as openly and as closely as possible to the citizen.” More than a decade later, it was President von der Leyen’s European Commission, which made the most significant move towards delivering on this commitment introducing the Conference on the Future of Europe and moving forward with engaging citizens in decisions on pressing policy issues. Citizen engagement in policymaking refers to the carefully planned, facilitated and structured opportunities whereby citizens come together to share, discuss, deliberate, and co-create policy. These exchanges range from more consultation-oriented formats to fully-fledged processes where a decision is collectively crafted through collaboration among the participants. Both scholars and policymakers now have come to accept that citizen engagement can influence different stages of the policy cycle, including problem identification, agenda setting, solution options elaboration, and service implementation. The Joint Research Centre is actively involved in promoting citizen engagement in policymaking in the EU Commission. As is the case with any innovative undertaking, there is the need to develop further knowledge on what works, how it works, whether it fulfils its promise, what new it spurs if any, what it means for policy-making and what lessons can be drawn for the future. Nevertheless, there is little unity within communities of scientists and practitioners, who advance multiple and often competing visions on how participation and deliberation can work better, and what “better” even means. Rather than directing evaluation at trying to understand how participation and deliberation can be improved (and improve democracy by extension), a more compelling reason to evaluate citizen engagement is to understand how to make the best use of participation for policymaking. This would require a shift away from purely normative orientations to looking more specifically into how citizens’ agency is being enabled and how that contributed to, or transformed, policy design and policymaking. Thus, a very novel imperative emerges to conduct evaluation of citizen engagement for policymaking, which concerns its use to inform decision-making, to facilitate the adoption of new processes, and to account for emerging lessons. We here propose a framework to conduct such evaluation for the purpose of improving the uptake of citizen engagement outputs into the EU Commission policymaking process and draw policy lessons on how to design more accountable processes.