Active Cities for EU promotes local decision making through public consultations, to strengthen citizens’ active involvement in European political life. The project focuses on women as tackling gender inequality in the EU.
The National Union of County Councils of Romania (UNCJR) is one of the “Active Cities for EU partners”, an European “Network of Towns” initiative which brings together 5 partners from Greece, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia and Spain. The main goal is to promote the citizens’ engagement and participation as an essential aspect of the participatory democracy at local level.
The kick-off event launching the new project was held on 29 March with the participation of all partners – the Municipality of Kallithea (Greece), the lead partner of the project, the Hungarian National Association of Local authorities, the Municipality of Xativa (Spain), UNCJR, and the Association of Urban Municipalities of Slovenia, and provided a good opportunity to get more information about the European programme milestones and also to exchange experiences about the main local challenges, initiatives and prospects on this subject.
Funded by the European Union under the Citizens, Equality, Rights and Values programme (CERV), this project aims to understand the reasons behind the different levels of participation to active citizenship activities in different countries, identify, share and discuss best practices, methodologies and tools, simplify the identified methodologies and tools and disseminate them in other EU Member States, train municipal personnel in the use of the simplified methodologies and tools to increase citizens’ participation, support local authorities in planning and implementing public consultations to involve citizens in policymaking.
The target audiences of the project are local and provincial authorities at country level, but also local authorities outside the partners’ countries. Women and young people are also a special focus of this project as according to all data they are underrepresented in public consultations and in some cases they are also lacking interest to participate.
Project innovative aspects
The innovative aspect of the current project is therefore based on the simplification and thus the ‘democratisation’ of the public consultation tools and methodologies. The gamification of active citizen participation will also be explored as well as the possibility of transforming some of the proposed solutions (e.g., the selection of communication channels and dissemination tips) to an online application rather than a simple document/guide.