The EU is currently developing its Civil Society Strategy. Our response explores public participation, administrative burdens and technical solutions to existing public participation deficits. It also highlights mechanisms through which enabling environments for meaningful public participation can be created, including:
• Providing structured and regular opportunities to participate with information available at different levels for different audiences (lay and expert), with sufficient information to enable deep engagement.
• Accessible means of making the contribution, proper timeframes, and a guarantee of meaningfulness – that the information provided by the public or group will actually be utilised by the decision maker, and that the input is solicited sufficiently early in the process when it will actually be possible to have an impact on the final outcomes.
• Binding obligations are required to ensure decision makers attend to the sometimes onerous task of engaging with contributions, and conducting adequate processes.
• For wide and deep engagement across all sectors of society, in particular marginalised groups, it is important that a variety of methods and approaches are used, to ensure views of all sectors of society are facilitated. This is particularly important where marginalised groups have a history of mistreatment by State Authorities, and may be distrustful/cynical of State processes or wary of dealings with authority figures.
• Public consultations need to be scheduled thoughtfully to avoid overload on both the public authority and the public/CSOs from whom input is sought.
Download this document:
Share this publication:
Join our mailing list to receive the EJNI newsletter: your first look at the latest events, research and publications from EJNI and the environmental justice sector.