INCITE-DEM was present at the Media, Politics and Democracy Congress organised by ICNova/Nova University of Lisbon and DCC/Autonoma University of Lisbon, which took place on the 28th of February.
Our colleagues from the Faculty of Lisbon’s CE3C – Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes, João Limão, Sandra Oliveira and Inês Campos, made two presentations:
Democratic innovations and communication: learnings from the Conference on the Future of Europe experience
was presented by João Limão, stressing the key role of communication for democratic innovations, being it as means to communicate with their audiences and participants, as tools for the functioning of mini-publics (as in the case of the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE) that is a citizens assembly) or to communicate the process and results to the wider public (in this case, EU wide and member-states citizens).
According to João Limão, who was present in Lisboa, as important as it is for the exercise of democracy, communication is still an understudied field and its role is not sufficiently explored to assess the key factors that contribute to the efficiency and success of democratic innovations. It was possible to identify some of the successes and weaknesses of the use of communication by CoFoE, a unique and innovative transnational democratic experiment:
“A general challenge to attract media interest towards the process of CoFoE, when there were no visible results” as well as “difficulties of communication of the objectives and processes towards the participating citizens. /…/ This communication challenge increases even more with regard to the communication flows on the follow-up of CoFoE,”
Limão further emphasises from this research, one of the 15 case studies developed by the INCITE-DEM team.
The second presentation was a preliminary analysis:
Democracy Laboratory: what is the role citizens attribute to communication?
presented by Sandra Oliveira. This presentation uses the results of one of INCITE-DEM’s Democracy Laboratory – the Lisbon Lab – and examines how important communication is for the group of 29 citizens engaged in democratic innovations (DIs) co-creation.
Sandra Oliveira pointed out how the preliminary analysis shed some light into the roles attributed to communication by citizens when co-creating their own mechanisms and DIs – and the needs and functions that communication complies with. And how this degree of importance given by citizens to communication can denote a naturalization of the use of communication as a tool, as a channel and as an element of civic participation mechanisms.
Oliveira emphasized this importance and naturalisation may also denote how communication is key to increase civic participation.