Description
The project addresses weak civic participation and active citizenship in Bulgaria due to lack of information, low trust in the authorities and missing civic participation mechanisms. The project aims to solve these issues by providing information, improving the dialogue and trust between citizens and local authorities and setting up civil participation mechanisms thus contributing to more efficient democracy. First, “citizens’ jury” will be set up and promoted as a mechanism enabling citizens to make collective recommendations to the authorities. 12 voluntarily selected jurors will have sessions twice per month. Second, the Bauersachs Approach will be used to promote the citizens’ jury by live streaming online. Next, information meetings at Economics Forum will be held on topical issues to raise public awareness. The project will benefit about 10 000 citizens, members of the target group, by raising their awareness and actively involving them in dialogue with the authorities.
Summary of project results
The project addressed weak civic participation and active citizenship in Bulgaria due to lack of information, low trust in the authorities and missing civic participation mechanisms. It helped facilitate the dialogue between citizens and local authorities, thus allowing the participating citizens to formulate over 90 recommendations. The project team developed and put into practice (for the first time in Bulgaria according to data available) a mechanism for active civic participation of the type of "citizens’ jury” in the process of decision-making at the local level. The "citizens’ jury” method was modified to include greater publicity, video recordings and polls that allowed a larger group of people to support the formulated recommendations and observations. Mainly independent experts and representatives of the private sector participated as "witnesses" in the "citizens’ jury" meetings. The main target group was able to get involved in the project, having formulated a large number of recommendations to the local authorities, with some of them taken into consideration in the local policies’ formulation. The videos and direct broadcasts of the activity of the "citizens’ jury" can be found on the platform developed at
www.votx.org/poll.
Summary of bilateral results