European Citizens’ Initiative Research Articles

Representing European Civil Society: A Decentred and Political Approach

From the Maastricht treaty to the economic crisis in 2008, the practitioners were inclined to associate European Civil Society (ECS) with the EU supported- large NGOs located in Brussels. The EU institutions, particularly the European Commission, aimed to involve the citizens' interests, demands, and concerns through the organised actors of civil society when the EU was deemed to suffer from a democratic deficit and political legitimacy. This practice of mobilizing the organised actor of civil society within the scope of participatory governance would allay these concerns. Nonetheless, since the economic crisis in 2008, the EU institutions' focus on Brussels-based NGOs has become less prominent. On the one hand, the launching of the European Citizens Initiative opened new venues for the EU to contact citizens directly. On the other hand, in addition to the economic crisis in 2008, other pressing issues, including the rise of the populist right, Brexit, and migration, had a tectonic effect on ECS. Such effects are yet to be analyzed, and this article offers a conceptual/interpretive analysis of this change. This new perspective decentres ECS and reconsiders how citizens' interests can be linked to the European governance and what it means to represent the EU's social constituency.

The revised European Directive 2020/2184 on the quality of water intended for human consumption. A step forward in risk assessment, consumer safety and informative communication

Water is an indispensable element for humankind and indeed all living beings; as such it is essential that it be supplied in adherence with safety and security criteria so as to fulfill its primordial role in community development. Therefore, the European Union has issued a new Directive on drinking water, updating the previous one (98/83/EC).The main new features of the updated Directive issued on January 12, 2021 include:• The adoption of a risk-based approach, in accordance with the principles of the Water Safety Plan, along the entire supply chain including the domestic system from the meter to the tap;• The updating of some quality standards, mainly related to the introduction of new parameters and the modification of parameter values for some in a more restrictive sense and for others in more permissive terms;• The identification of possible emerging pollutants present in supply sources (catchment areas);• The demand for effective and transparent communication to citizens on the quality of the water supplied, necessary to foster consumer confidence in the mains water supply.The Directive is the first European legislation adopted following a European Citizens' Initiative (ECI), a European Union participatory democracy tool launched through the “Right2Water” initiative aiming to positively affect the environment. Indeed, the increased consumer confidence in tap water resulting from the desired improvement in communication to citizens should lead to a gradual reduction in the use of plastic water bottles.In addition, the Directive confirms what WHO has been reporting for some time through its Water Safety Plans. It is not limited to monitoring activities but also reproposes and promotes a generalised safety approach based on risk identification and management along the entire drinking water supply chain (from the catchment area to extraction, treatment, storage including distribution).The revised Directive will become the reference standard for the quality of water intended for human consumption in EU countries, and its entry into force will make it possible to minimise the harmful impacts of pollution on human health.

Case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union with regard to the European Citizen’s Initiative

Under consideration in the present article is the case-law of the Court of Justice of the European Union (General court and Court of Justice) in the period 2012–2022 with regard to the European Citizen’s Initiative (ECI). On the first hand under consideration is the relevant case-law of the General court regarding cases about ECI, and on the second hand there is consideration of the respective Court of Justice’s case-law with regard to judgments of the General court that have been appealed before that higher jurisdiction.

Instant democracy: a look forward to the EU’s digital future

Democracy’s resilience is being put to the test by the 21st century. The impactof globalisation and digitalisation has disenfranchised many but so have traditional democratic practices. In an era of constant and immediate communication, with society embracing technological advances while struggling to cope with its inadvertent effects, democracy is still tethered to traditional practices that limit citizens’ roles to casting their ballots every few years. However, theory is now being put to the test and experiments with digital democracy are popping up across the globe. In this article, we cover three participative democracy instruments, namely the European Citizens Initiative, e-Voting and e-Participatory Budgeting, delving into their potential and identifying their limitations, in the context of the European Union. We also cover the unforeseen threats to democracy posed by information security issues and social media.

Front and Back Covers, Volume 37, Number 4. August 2021

Front and back cover caption, volume 37 issue 4Front coverTOXIC FLOWS: E‐WASTE RECYCLINGA worker starts a fire to burn off the insulation from electrical cables to extract copper at an informal e‐waste recycling site in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Open fire is one of the methods used here to mine metals from defunct electronics devices and their components.Electronic waste is one of the fastest‐growing types of waste worldwide. However, many countries lack the formalized infrastructures necessary to collect and handle e‐waste safely. The informal sector has stepped up to fill the gap. E‐waste attracts urban dwellers seeking to extract value from these discarded materials while releasing toxic compounds detrimental to health and the environment.In this special issue on toxic flows, Samwel Moses Ntapanta follows Dar es Salaam's informal e‐waste recyclers to find out how they understand the toxic nature of their work and what measures they take to minimize exposure. The number of informal e‐waste recycling workshops in Dar es Salaam has skyrocketed in recent years. High demand for metals, like copper, offers a stable livelihood for e‐waste recycling workers.Scavenging spare parts from the electronic afterlives is primarily driven by a vibrant Tanzanian local market, giving an impetus to repurpose certain materials. During these activities (mining, repurposing, restoring and reusing), workers are exposed to many toxic chemical compounds. With little or no knowledge about these, workers in informal e‐waste recycling face unknown risks of exposure as they make a dangerous living in urban environments.Back coverTOXIC FLOWS: GLYPHOSATELaunch of the #StopGlyphosate campaign supported by the European Citizens' Initiative (ECI) and 37 European organizations in front of the European Parliament, 8 February 2017.Across the globe, grass‐roots movements against glyphosate, the world's most used herbicide, have encouraged regulators to re‐examine its safety assessments. In Europe, a drawn‐out process is widely expected to conclude that glyphosate is harmful to health and should be banned across all 28 member states. If so, this would likely lead to similar decisions in other markets, representing a blow to the agrochemical industry.More than any other pesticide, efforts to ban glyphosate have become tied up with questions of national sovereignty. From Vietnam and Thailand to Colombia and Mexico, the US government has threatened ‘trade disruption’ should a ban go ahead. The message is clear: chemical regulation is an international, not a domestic, matter.Nevertheless, glyphosate has become a standard for emerging populism. In post‐war Sri Lanka, banning glyphosate became a mission of Buddhist nationalist movements seeking to purify the national body. In the UK, Brexit supporters argued an independent UK would have the freedom to stop glyphosate (another ‘Vote Leave’ promise quickly broken).As politics the world over has re‐engaged with questions of national identity and autonomy, halting the free flow of glyphosate has become a goal for those on the left and right of the political spectrum.

Constructing policy narratives for transnational mobilization: Insights from European Citizens’ Initiatives

AbstractOne of the European Union (EU) institutions’ responses to the alleged “democratic deficit” in the EU is the introduction of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). The ECI provides an agenda‐setting tool accessible to different advocacy groups. This study investigates the narrative strategies of ECI organizers to mobilize citizens across the EU. Which storytelling characteristics are present in the policy narratives used by ECIs? To address this question theoretically, we rely on the Narrative Policy Framework. Empirically, we examine 59 ECIs registered between 2012 and 2020. The analysis concentrates on three dimensions of policy narratives: the mentioning of (i) story characters and (ii) cost‐benefit frames as forms of narrative strategy to increase public attention, and (iii) evidence as a means of persuasion. Our findings show that ECIs predominantly make use of the devil shift in their policy narratives and use cost‐benefit frames and evidence to expand the scope of conflict.

Water justice and Europe’s Right2Water movement

ABSTRACT In 2013 the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) ‘Right2Water’ collected 1.9 million signatures across Europe against water privatization. It became the first ever successful ECI and has built a Europe-wide movement. Right2Water sought for Europe’s legal enforcement of the Human Right to Water and Sanitation (HRWS) as a strategic political tool to challenge European Union market policies. The paper examines the ECI from a social movement perspective. Although the European Commission subscribed that ‘water is a public good, not a commodity’, its implementation is subject to continuing politics and socio-political struggle, with growing urgency in times of the Covid-19 pandemic crisis.

EUROPEAN CITIZENS’ INITIATIVE: A PARTICIPATORY INSTRUMENT TO STRENGTHEN EUROPEAN GENERAL PUBLIC FOR THE PROTECTION OF ENVIRONMENT

The Lisbon Treaty introduced the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) as a mechanism to strengthen citizen participation and to obviate the gap between the EU and the citizens. It aims to encourage EU-wide debates and to involve citizens in the decision-making process at the EU level by providing a mechanism of legislative initiative in which new actors could participate in the EU legislative procedure. ECI enables organized civil societies and citizens to have a voice in influencing the EU policy beyond mere information transfer and discussion and therefore can represent a remarkable stage for transnational democracy in the EU by contributing to the establishment of a shared political platform for ordinary citizens. It also provides individuals with a great opportunity to place neglected or politically controversial themes on the agenda of the EU directly. Hence the ECI might be a convenient tool for the protection of the environment. However, there remain obstacles which impede the progression of the ECI to become an effective and sufficient component of participatory democracy.

How the European Citizens’ Initiative ‘Water and Sanitation is a Human Right!’ Changed EU Discourse on Water Services Provision

In 2010 the United Nations General Assembly recognized the human right to water and sanitation in what is seen as a historical vote by water activists. Implementation of the right to water is imperative to achieve sustainable development. In 2011 the regulation for a European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) entered into force in the European Union. With such an initiative it is possible to propose an issue for European legislation by collecting one million signatures from citizens in at least seven Member States. The European federation of trade unions in the public services sector (EPSU) decided to take up the challenge to organise such an ECI and formed a diverse coalition of organisations and water activists that became known as ‘Right2Water.’ Their proposal was ‘to implement the human right to water and sanitation in European law.’ Although it was successful in achieving the required number of supporters, the European Commission answered that implementation of the human right to water was to be left to Member States and that there was no need to change existing legislation. The Right2Water movement aimed not as much to change legislation but more to challenge EU neoliberal policies and shift them from a ‘market approach’ to a ‘rights-based approach.’ This chapter looks at the factors that contributed to the success of ‘Right2Water,’ how the ideological debate around the human right to water took place during the campaign and the impact it had on EU discourse as well as on EU water policy.

Civil Society and the Governance of Water Services: German Political Parties’ Reactions to Right2Water

The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) Right2Water asked for guaranteed water quality and quantity all over Europe, and demanded that water services remain in the hands of public entities. Support for Right2Water was particularly pronounced in Germany. The German organisers managed to collect 16 times more signatures than the minimum necessary to be counted towards the quorum. How have the German political parties reacted to the overwhelming public support for Right2Water? To answer this question, we examined the election manifestos of the main political parties, published for the federal elections in 2005, 2009, 2013, and 2017, and the elections to the European Parliament in 2004, 2009, 2014, and 2019. We concentrated on one specific goal of Right2Water, which refers to preventing the liberalisation of water services in the European Union. We expected the attention to and positioning of the liberalisation of water services to vary across the individual German parties. Since Right2Water was organised by public service trade unions and pursues an anti-liberalisation agenda, we expected left-wing parties to have laid a greater emphasis on this issue than right-wing parties, and for them to have adopted positions that aligned with the goals of the ECI. Our empirical findings show that a left–right division exists among the parties concerning the attention they paid to this issue as well as how they positioned themselves.

Introduction: multilevel democracy in the European Union and the innovations of the Lisbon Treaty

The Lisbon Treaty contained three institutional innovations that were designed to make the European Union (EU) more democratic: the Ordinary Legislative Procedure (OLP), the Early Warning Mechanism (EWM) for national parliaments, and the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI). This short article sets the stage for a symposium that assesses whether the three mechanisms have indeed contributed to the EU’s democratization. It situates OLP, EWM, and ECI in the EU’s system of multilevel democracy and raises the question of whether the mechanisms address the institutional and societal factors that cause the EU’s democratic deficit.

Framing TTIP in the wake of the Greenpeace leaks: agonistic and deliberative perspectives on frame resonance and communicative power

ABSTRACT Although never conceived as a tool of direct democracy, the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) raised hopes that it would involve citizens more directly in EU decision making. Previous research has suggested that one contribution of the ECI is its effect on fostering public deliberation on EU issues, raising questions about the ECI’s potential as a tool for social movements to generate communicative power in relation to EU issues. This article draws on agonistic and deliberative perspectives to argue that communicative power generation can be seen as a process where ECI organizers use social media to advance specific understandings of their concerns and channel those understandings into mainstream mass media. The article analyses this by investigating how frames constructed on the Stop TTIP campaign’s Facebook page have resonated in twelve online news sites in four European countries in the wake of the Greenpeace leaks.

The European Citizens’ Initiative and Greek debt relief: Anagnostakis

The European Citizens’ Initiative and Greek debt relief: Anagnostakis

The European Citizens’ initiative: too much democracy for EU polity?

AbstractThis Article analyzes the state of democracy in the EU through the study of the European Citizens’ Initiative. The European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) represents one of the main ways the European institutions chose during the making of the European Convention, and then reproduced in the Lisbon Treaty, to beat populism by bringing decision-making closer to the citizens and promoting a new legitimization of Europe’s political unity. This Article starts by arguing that if one wants to understand European versions of populism it is necessary to pay attention to the reason why “democratic deficit” and “Euroscepticism” are predominant problems that the European Union is facing. It then analyzes the implementation of the ECI and the main issues of this instrument of democratization pointing at three flaws: a) the problem of e-democracy; b) the difficulty of stimulating large participation of civil society and people for the purposes of the ECIs; c) the cumbersome role of the EU Commission and the difficulties to ensure a real participatory instrument for the European citizens. From the analysis of the ECI this Article first advocates for a more robust public sphere in Europe as indispensable ground for a supranational democracy; second, it supports the revision of the ECI procedural aspects to transform it into a viable channel for amending EU policies in a more democratic way; third, this Article participates in the debate over the brand of democracy most suited to EU governance and polity.

Znaczenie europejskiej inicjatywy obywatelskiej w kontekście deficytu demokracji w Unii Europejskiej

The Importance of the European Citizens’ Initiative in the Context of Democratic Deficit in the European UnionOne of the instruments introduced into EU law on the basis of the Treaty of Lisbon for the first time, aimed at strengthening the democratic legitimacy of the functioning of the EU, is the European citizens’ initiative (ECI). The regulation on the ECI was adopted and entered into force in 2011 and started to apply from 1 April 2012. It seems, that almost six years of the functioning of the ECI is a sufficient period of time to try to assess its meaning to strengthen the democratic legitimacy of the functioning of the EU. The main aim of the study is to answer the question: whether, taking into account the experiences of the ECI, the European citizens’ initiative contributed to reducing the democratic deficit in the EU and thus to strengthening the legitimization of the European Union institutions and the EU as a whole. The article indicates the objectives of the ECI, which would allow to reduce the democratic deficit in the EU and strengthen the legitimacy of this organization. The most important data illustrating the functioning of the EIO were also presented. The next part of the article is the analysis and assessment of the importance of the ECI in reducing the democracy deficit and strengthening the legitimacy of the EU. The conclusions are included in the summary.

The European Citizens’ Initiative: bringing the EU closer to its citizens?

In defiance of accounts which see the European Union (EU) as structurally incompatible with democracy, the Lisbon Treaty set out the general right and specific means for citizens to participate in EU decision-making. Whilst the Treaty codified long-established practices of representative democracy and of dialogue with civil society organizations, it also notably introduced a new measure, the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), commencing in 2012. The ECI has limited formal powers, with no ability to mandate political institutions. It is promoted by the European Commission as an agenda-setting and participatory democracy measure, rather than one of direct democracy. Nonetheless, it has an elevated status within one of the current European Commission’s ten strategic priorities and is remarkable in a number of ways. First, it differs from the European Commission’s established partnerships and dialogue with organized interests by focusing on direct forms of wider citizen participation. Second, it is the world’s first transnational citizens’ initiative, with aspirations to help build an EU-wide public sphere. These aspirations were assessed in a 2017 review of the measure, proposing the introduction of a number of reforms aimed at tackling limited impact to date. This article evaluates the impact of the ECI in its first 5 years and then discusses the proposed reforms in terms of their potential to increase public deliberation. It develops and appraises evaluative criteria that help to assess whether institutionalizing contention, even in ways highly critical of EU institutions, might enhance public deliberation and bring the EU closer to its citizens.

Fulfilling High Hopes? The Legitimacy Potential of the European Citizens’ Initiative

AbstractThe European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) constitutes the Union’s first genuine instrument of direct democracy. The first experiences with regard to its deployment have however proved disappointing, criticism of the instrument is mounting, and suggestions for reform abound. This raises the question whether the ECI holds any genuine potential to enhance the legitimacy of the EU - or whether it should at least in this regard be considered an ineffective, misguided experiment instead. The current paper provides a response by triangulating three types of data: legal insight and argument, empirical information with regard to the functioning of the instrument in the first five years of its operation, and a rational assessment of the procedure, now and in the future. This allows for a comprehensive reflection on the impact the ECI has had, and what impact it may yet have in the long or medium term, on the overall legitimacy of the EU.

What Triggers the Intention to Use the European Citizens’ Initiative? The Role of Benefits, Values and Efficacy

AbstractThe European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI) is a European Union instrument that aspires to encourage citizens to participate in EU policy‐making. Although scholarly interest in the ECI is strong, only isolated studies have examined the factors that shape the intention to use it. This article fills a gap in the literature by examining how personal benefits from the EU, value‐based assessments of the EU, and political efficacy (internal and external) may trigger potential use of the ECI. It develops a model that is tested with recent Eurobarometer data. Results show that personal benefits from the EU are key determinants of the intention to use the ECI while considerations based on democratic values play a less important role. In addition, internal political efficacy emerges as a strong predictor of potential use. The results challenge the expectation that the ECI could broaden public engagement with EU affairs.

Direct democracy and trade union action

Until recently, the political influence of trade unions primarily relied on ties to labour-friendly political parties. Since the 1990s, however, party-union relations have deteriorated, forcing unions to consider complementary political strategies. This article reviews different direct democratic instruments at local, national and EU levels. We distinguish popular consultations initiated by government from above from citizens’ initiatives initiated from below and discuss corresponding trade union experiences in Germany, Italy, Ireland, Slovenia and Switzerland. We also analyse the successful right2water European Citizens Initiative (ECI) of the European Federation of Public Service Unions and the failed fair transport ECI of the European Transport Workers’ Federation at EU level. Whereas unions have successfully used direct democratic instruments to (i) defend social achievements or (ii) as a lever to extract policy concessions, direct democracy is also challenging. Successful direct democratic campaigns require unions that are able to mobilise their own rank-and-file and to inspire larger sections of society.

On the Unfulfilled Democratisation Potential of the European Citizenss Initiative

The paper demonstrates that, unfortunately, the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), which was introduced by the Lisbon Treaty and by the EU Regulation on the citizens’ initiative, has not yet lived up to its democratisation potential. The ECI has had a disappointingly limited impact as a democratisation instrument and has failed to meaningfully enhance the participation of EU citizens in the EU’s political debate and decision-making. Following a survey of critical evaluations of the functioning of the ECI up to now, the paper looks at the recently proposed revision of the ECI Regulation. The proposed revision unfortunately limits itself to measures making the ECI more user-friendly and less burdensome for ECI organisers and signatories. It will be argued that measures of this nature cannot on their own transform the ECI into an effective EU agenda-setting tool that would foster political debate and citizen decision-making participation at the EU level. Such a transformation is not possible without strengthening the legislative impact of successful ECIs. The paper will therefore propose ways of making the ECI legislatively more powerful and thus fully capable of fulfilling its democratisation potential.