Democratic Odyssey

The Democratic Odyssey is a crowdsourced, decentralized and collaborative campaign developing a concept and strategy to institutionalise a permanent peoples’ assembly and participatory eco-system in the European Union. By building on lessons learned from the Conference on the Future of Europe (COFE) and other deliberative experiments, we are organizing a randomly selected transnational peoples’ assembly as a prototype for an EU-wide European Peoples’ Assembly; showcasing how citizen participation can be enacted in all stages of the EU’s policy processes, from agenda setting and legislative initiative to co-legislation and even constitutional Treaty Change. Our vision is holistic: to demonstrate how to combine the design of transnational citizens' assemblies with pre-existing instruments of citizen participation (such as European Citizens’ Initiatives) and how concretely to embed citizen participation and deliberation in the multi-layered ecosystem of representative democracy in the EU. A consortium of partners led by the EUI’s STG Transnational Democracy Programme is developing a concept and strategy to institutionalise a permanent citizens’ assembly and participatory eco-system in the European Union. The aim is to provide momentum to the eventual adoption of such an assembly as a formal part of the EU system of governance, by organising an actionable pilot in Athens in September 2024, that will showcase how deliberation can be enacted in all stages of the EU’s policy processes, from agenda setting and legislative initiative to co-legislation. The Democratic Odyssey was conceived and launched as a long-term journey through the rugged landscape of democratic contemporary pathologies. As a decentralised, collaborative and transparent exercise of crowdsourcing and co-creation, it seeks to bring together as many contributors as possible in different capacities and with different roles in the form of a Constituent Network.