The European Citizen Action Service has released a paper: ‘Economic governance: public consultations during the crises. It examined the role of public consultations in the decisions made by the European Union in its initial response to the financial and economic crisis. This paper showed there has been an on-going issue with the vast majority of economic consultation documents being available exclusively in English. Further, in the few instances of significant citizen participation in consultations, it is difficult to discern how much influence these citizens have had. Next, and perhaps most importantly, the economic consultations are usually highly technical documents that require such an extensive level of knowledge and expertise that the majority of consultations are inaccessible to most citizens.
In highlighting the flaws with consultations as they are currently run, the intention of this paper was to show that there are solutions which will allow for increased citizen involvement in the consultation process going forward.
- Raise Awareness about the consultation procedure;
- Address the Technical Nature of Consultations;
- Provide more Extensive Feedback;
- Modernise Communication Methods.
The full study conducted by ECAS is available here.