April 30, 2016
Open policy making is a term that originated in the UK government's civil service reform work, and which refers to a connected set of open government approaches including transparency, bringing different voices into the policy making process, and experimenting with new participation initiatives. It has generally focused on civil service action rather than legislative, media or parliamentary action. This report assesses the history of the European Union's related initiatives, particularly within the Commission, and considers the opportunities and challenges for an open policy approach at European level. The Commission's approach to open policy making has followed developments elsewhere. As public sector practice has developed, the EU's practice has developed, but it has not sought to position itself as an innovator. In this context, we discuss several initiatives, such as Plan D, the 2001 White Paper on Governance, and the most recent Better Regulation proposals. This report shows that the EU and its citizens could benefit from a more purposeful approach to opening up policy making. We set out a model based around several different sorts of initiative – information, transparency, crowdsourcing, commenting, deliberation, and feedback.To most citizens EU policy processes can seem complex and difficult to engage with, but civil society and policy makers share a common interest in creating better conversations and a wider range of perspectives on policy. In this report we set out the issues raised during three workshop discussions on issues in open policy making undertaken as part of this project. Through producing this report we have discovered that there is potential and interest in aproductive partnership between institutions and civil society to create a shared development agenda for open policy making. Several existing smaller projects show the possible way forward for such a partnership. We discuss the European Citizens' Initiative, Futurium, Citizen Dialogues, the Better Regulation proposals, and two external initiatives that the EU has supported, such as Debating Europe and D-CENT. Such a partnership also has barriers to overcome. We consider the different logics of policy making and crowdsourcing, the difficulties of engaging people in highly complex issues, and the role of experts. Finally, we consider the most productive avenues for future work, and make recommendations. We focus on better communications, transparency, focused experiments on participation, new routes for comment, mixing methods of engagement, and connecting the European conversation into city-level and local conversations.
Civic Engagement: European Citizens' Initiatives
