Civic Engagement in Policy-Making Processes in Estonia: A Controversial Success Story

Abstract

Estonia is often considered a post-Soviet success story in terms of civil society development and its advanced institutional infrastructure for promoting civic engagement in policymaking processes. Since the beginning of the 2000s, several legal and institutional initiatives like the Civil Society Development Concept (EKAK, adopted in 2002), The Good Involvement Practices (2006) and various experiments in the field of e-democracy and deliberative democracy have really encouraged civic engagement in policy-making and made it more or less regular in many policy areas. However, the Estonian success story proves to be full of contradictions: on one hand, civic engagement has indeed made many spectacular advances over the recent decades, but on the other hand lack of enthusiasm from some parts of the political elites and actual passivity among the general public have set limits for further progress. Nonetheless, the major problem seems to be uneven development in which there are significant discrepancies between different geographical regions, public institutions and policy areas regarding civic engagement in policymaking. Furthermore, there is a growing gap between the more capable and resourceful NGOs, which have better access to the policy-making process, and the less resourceful civic organisations struggling to get attention from the policy-makers. Consequently, it is possible to learn several lessons from the Estonian case that might be useful for other post-Soviet countries. The supportive and elaborate legal-institutional framework is very important to promote civic engagement, but progress is always uneven (big variances between different regions, policy areas, sections of civil society), and as attitudes in society and among the elites evolve slowly, it takes several decades to reap the full benefits of these institutional reforms.