Civil Society Consultations

As part of Work Package 10, the TRUEDEM project organized a series of workshops with representatives of civil society organizations and trade unions. These workshops were conceived as a way to engage directly with actors who work at the interface between citizens and institutions and who play a crucial role in shaping democratic practices. By bringing these perspectives into the project, WP10 ensures that its outputs are not only scientifically robust but also informed by the knowledge and experience of practitioners.

To guarantee both comparability and inclusivity, the workshops followed a common methodological framework across all participating countries. Each national team was asked to convene a small but diverse group of around nine to twelve participants, typically one per organization, to avoid over-representation and to capture a wide range of views. The workshops were conducted in the national language in order to enable open discussion and meaningful contributions.

The workshops were organized using the World Café method, a participatory approach that combines informality with structured exchange. In this format, participants sit at three small tables in a “café style” setting, each table focusing on a different guiding question. After fifteen minutes of discussion, participants rotate to the next table, while a designated host stays behind to summarize what was said in the previous round and to welcome new contributors. A note-taker at each table carefully records the discussion, both on a poster visible to all participants and in detailed minutes. This structure allows ideas to circulate and build collectively, while ensuring that nothing of importance is lost in the process.

The guiding questions were identical across all workshops: (1) How should democratic innovations be organized? (2) How can participation in democratic innovations be effectively facilitated? (3) What are the limitations of using democratic innovations? These three prompts provided a shared backbone for all discussions, helping the consortium later to draw comparisons across countries while leaving participants free to bring in their own experiences and priorities.

Each workshop lasted between ninety minutes and two hours. Concise summaries of these workshops are included below. They offer an overview of the themes raised and the perspectives shared by civil society and trade union representatives. Together, they demonstrate how the World Café method can be used to generate structured yet open-ended dialogue, and how WP10 integrates these discussions into its wider effort to produce policy-relevant knowledge for strengthening trust in European democracies.