WP4 will carry out a public consultation. Its main objectives are:
- Make a concrete and policy-relevant example on EU level coordinated public consultation with a link to parliaments;
- Give input to policy-making about policies on pandemic crisis, in terms of expression of informed ideas and opinion from near-representative samples of citizens;
- Engaging citizens in the debate of pandemic crisis prevention and management. The normative component of pandemic crisis, involving obvious conflicts and dilemmas, combined with a well-documented scientific knowledge base, and a need for political action in the crisis situation, makes this issue suited for technology assessment with citizen consultation methodology. Further, the issue seems to be well suited for a cross-European coordinated assessment, because of the high impact European policy-making has on national/regional regulation.
The work will take form as a transnational citizen consultation with simultaneous national face-to-face 1-day meetings with a web-based framework for transnational comparison of the national results. The method will be developed as a part of the Action Plan Handbook in T3.3, and will be inspired by the World Wide Views method.
Citizens at all national meetings receive the same information (before and during the meeting), are subject to the same facilitated process and answer the same questions. The method delivers a transnational overview of how citizens in the involved countries answer a set of pre-defined questions, and which messages they want themselves to send to policy-makers. An Internet service provides transparency with regards to partners, information material, process and the full set of result data.
WP4 is built on WP2 and WP3 and will provide outputs for WP5, notably for T5.1 (Social Media Mobilization) and T5.3 (Local Initiatives). WP4 will be highly coordinated with WP7, to ensure European dissemination. National dissemination in the involved countries will be part of the work in T4.2. The work is separated into only three major tasks, because of the nature of the method, which involves a highly integrated set of coordination activities (background production), and the national/regional citizen consultations.
