The Real Deal Protocol: Guidance and Toolkit for Citizen and Stakeholder Engagement for the European Green Deal and Beyond

REAL DEAL explored new pathways to enhance citizens’ participation around the European Green Deal with a team of 16 partners from academia, civil society organisations and practitioners, from a wide range of disciplines, including environmental rights, ethics, gender studies, geography, urban planning, and sustainability studies. It involved the EU’s largest civil society networks on environment, climate, sustainable development, local democracy and the European movement, as well as youth, social justice and women’s organisations, altogether with a wide outreach to citizens and policymakers. Partners analysed criteria, processes, concepts and formats, and conducted test cases with selected formats, both in person and digital, at EU level and in 13 European countries (Austria, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Italy, Ireland, Hungary, Lithuania, North Macedonia, Poland, Serbia, Spain, Ukraine). It was assumed that there is no 'one size fits all', as different formats serve different purposes of citizens' and stakeholder participation and deliberation. The project hence combined Citizen Assemblies and similar type events with Round Tables, Group Delphis and Focus Groups. It also experimented with methods like civic arts, applied feminist moderation techniques and developed a respective course. The main topics of the test cases were food systems and agriculture, economics (wellbeing economy, consumption, intergenerational justice, European Semester), as well as the cluster climate change, air quality, mobility. REAL DEAL also set up a Civil Society Forum for Sustainability (CSF), which was based on collaboration in the umbrella organisation ‘SDG Watch Europe’ and supported the project’s aim of bringing together actors from the sustainability and the democracy arenas. Based on all findings, partners co-created the “REAL DEAL Protocol” as presented in this brochure.