Kalypso Nicolaidis on Governing Together Through Demoicracy (Part 2)

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Glossary

Democratic Odyssey 

(02:19 or p.1 in the transcript)

The Democratic Odyssey is a decentralized, collaborative, and transparent exercise of crowdsourcing and co-creation kicked-off by a core consortium composed of The European University Institute’s School of Transnational Governance, Particip-Action, European Alternatives, Citizens Take Over Europe, The Democracy and Culture Foundation, Democracy Next, Mehr Demokratie, Eliamep, The Real Deal, Phoenix, The European Capital of Democracy, as well as the Berggruen and Salvia Foundations. This community is open to all who want to be involved. Threatened from within and outside by the rise of partisan hyper-polarization, authoritarian buy-in, disinformation and electoral interference, European democracy is under attack on all sides. As Europe needs to address citizens’ sense of disenfranchisement, pathways to renewal are necessary. For the Democratic Odyssey consortium, part of the solution lies in creating a standing European People’s Assembly that will become a core part of the institutional landscape of the European Union, made of citizens selected by lot, serving on a rotating basis. This project comes at an opportune moment. In the past five years, in Europe, there have been ten national assemblies and around 70 local assemblies on the topic of climate change alone. The EU itself took a huge leap with the Conference on the Future of Europe which integrated transnational, multi-lingual, sortition-based deliberation into the policy making process. The Conference planted a seed which the Democratic Odyssey wants to make flourish. As James Mackay, the project’s coordinator, declared in a recent interview with European Alternatives: “we are not aiming at making a ‘perfect’ assembly (whatever that would even mean). Our hope is more modest: to offer a “proof of concept” that, in the window between the EP elections but before the new Commissions convenes, can bring grassroots and institutional actors together to consider how citizens’ participation can be institutionalized in the longer term.” source