Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ortwin Renn

The European Green Deal is aimed at reaching a sustainable Europe. With ambitious environmental and climate objectives at its core, the European Green Deal (EGD) and successive policies such as the Clean Industrial Deal promise to transform the EU into a cleaner, healthier and more socially just place by 2050, with a large focus on greenhouse gas emission reductions. The planned cooperation with the Systemic Risk nNit explores how expert assessments of policy measures to reach the goals of climate protection can be reconciled and integrated with participatory formats of public deliberations with randomly selected citizens. THis research agenda is based upon experience developed through a three-year, multi-country and EU level project.. The research design of the so called REAL-DEAL Project was inspired by the idea to combine different participation formats to integrate knowledge, interests, values and preferences of different constituencies. For the inclusion of knowledge about policy measures to protect the climate the research team chose the format of a Group Delphi, which is aimed at representing consensus and dissent among experts about a controversial issue such as sustainable mobility or sustainable agriculture, and to provide justifications for dissenting viewpoints. The results of such Delphi rounds were then fed into other consecutive participations processes as input for prioritizing political actions or addressing trade-offs between conflicting values. Of special interest was the combination of a Delphi workshop with a citizen forum or assembly in which randomly selected citizens deliberate about policies for reducing carbon dioxide emissions in various sectors such as housing, nutrition and transportation. Such a combination was tested in Serbia, Poland, Germany and Greece in order to collect experiences from very different social and political cultures. The joint research agenda is envisioned to do a secondary analysis of the data obtained during the REAL-DEAL project and explore its significance for incluisve governance in Europe.