Workshop on the legal framework and institutional practice of municipal public participation in Poland and Germany.
More and more municipalities in Germany are issuing guidelines for public participation. However, how these guidelines fit into the legal regulations at national and European level, to what extent these also make standards of good participation (in our understanding: deliberative participation) binding, and whether these make any difference at all to participation practice on the ground, has not yet been sufficiently researched.
Over the past two years, a German-Polish research group from the Universities of Warsaw and Düsseldorf has intensively studied how municipal citizen participation is legally regulated in both countries. The findings are supplemented by interviews with participation officers from more than 30 municipalities on the practice of citizen participation. The results provide a unique insight into the law and practice of municipal public participation in both countries.
More information on the content and the programme of the event can be found here.
The event will take place on Thursday, 22 April, 9:00 am to 1:00 pm, exclusively online. Simultaneous translation into Polish and German will be provided during the event.
Participation is free of charge. Please register with your name and email address at the following link: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdm64e1W-zOX2rd3VVCaBwbmLgv5YxhDgwscFYPTVVS2xcmRw/viewform
Ansprechpartner
Jun.-Prof. Dr. Tobias Escher
Board, Computer Science, Political Science, Sociology
Tobias Escher leads a junior research group funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, focused on the effects of citizen participation on quality and legitimacy of political decisions regarding the transformation towards sustainable mobility, in particular on the local level. Previously he has managed both the Düsseldorf Institute for Internet and Democracy (DIID) and the PhD programme on local level online participation (NRW Forschungskolleg) of Heinrich-Heine-University Duesseldorf. His research interests are the design and evaluation of participatory processes online and offline. His particular focus is the potential contribution of citizen participation for increasing the quality and legitimacy/acceptance of political decisions. He has also developed a course on the theory and practice of online participation, a result of which has been a platform allowing students to shape their course curricula.
Tobias Escher is a social scientist with a PhD in Information Science, Communication Studies and the Social Sciences from the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. To asses the opportunities as well as the limitations of digital technologies he can also rely on his basic knowledge of Computer Science. Having previously worked and studied in Oxford, London, Leicester and Berlin, he joined Heinrich Heine University Duesseldorf in 2011.