PHOENIX: the rise of citizens voices for a greener Europe

Climate change is today’s most urgent geopolitical challenge for Europe, and the entire world. It is an unprecedented challenge, one in which different territories, social groups, stakeholders will have to coordinate to a scale never seen before. For this reason, we think that the ordinary instruments of representative democracy will not cut it: climate change will not stop at administrative borders. As we need to foster environmental and social governance, we must not forget the role of democratic governance in stabilising paradigmatic changes, such the one that the European Green Deal will entail. In the last decades, a whole new host of ‘democratic innovations’ has emerged to assist in such processes. Democratic innovations allow citizens to meaningfully participate in political debate, finding more inclusive policy solutions. With PHOENIX we want to raise the bar even higher, by hybridising participatory and deliberative practices. By doing this, we should be able to design democratic governance procedures that will allow both to collect the positions of people that usually do not engage in politics, as well as reaching a consensus on the best policies for the territories under investigation.