Topics

 Relation between assemblies and facilitators’ dialogue

» Assemblies’ methods and challenges

 Assemblies’ history and social construction

1. Objectives

The Regional Citizens’ Assembly is a process that lasts 18 to 24 months.

Its goal is to produce, within each social and professional milieu, a vision and perspectives addressing the 21st century’s major developments and then to establish a dialogue between the various perspectives so as to produce common priorities and strategies.

Globalisation, the inescapable interdependence between societies and between humankind and the biosphere, requires new democratic regulations. These in turn require that the tools of democracy be renewed and that new sorts of ties be established between global and local levels so that citizens, individually and collectively, don’t feel powerless when confronting new problems whose scale and complexity seem beyond their reach.

The Regional Citizens’ Assembly makes it possible to carry out a collective reflection on the future of a region by linking it to a vision of the evolution of Europe and of the entire planet.

The Regional Assembly is a major outgrowth of the World Assembly and thus shares its three guiding principles : major changes are on the way, they must be identified and prepared for ; building common perspectives calls for an awareness of the diversity of geographical and socio-professional contexts and points of view ; democracy, rather than being simply the staging of a contest between parties with opposed views, is based on the identification of common values, interests, challenges and commitments that cement a community and are the basis for living together.

The fact that the Regional Assembly is part of the world Alliance process has a double advantage : first, it uses and perfects the methodological tools developed for the World Assembly ; secondly, it has at its disposal the analyses and proposals, covering numerous fields, elaborated at the international level within the workshops and colleges of the Alliance for a Responsible, Plural and United World.

2. Program and calendar

The Regional Citizens’ Assembly process is the same as the itinerary that the 400 World Assembly participants followed for eight days. This itinerary has three phases :

• diagnoses are made and each milieu’s perspectives are sought out
• a collective exchange is carried out and common strategies are outlined
• a return to specific situations and the elaboration of plans of action

With the World Assembly, the extreme diversity of participants coming from every corner of the world made it necessary to impose certain limits : the participants could only be assembled once and the entire itinerary had to be covered in eight, fast-paced, days. The Regional Assembly, however, has the advantage of spatial unity : meetings are thus easy to organise and the process can be spread out over eighteen months.

The following chart sums up the itinerary’s stages

The first stage serves above all to get to know one another, to establish a diagnostic, to allow everyone to express themselves, to establish links between local and international reflections. The second, third and fourth stages serve above all to elaborate strategy : bringing to light common challenges, comparing experiences, formulating the broad outline of the changes to be carried out. The fifth stage is above all operational.

The calendar can be broken down into three six-month phases :

• an initial, preparatory phase
• a second “local” phase containing the 1st, 2nd and 3rd stages;
• a third “Regional Assembly” phase containing the 4th and 5th stages
• At the end of the 4th stage, that of the Regional Assembly proper, a Regional Charter and a Regional Agenda are adopted. Bringing together several thousand individuals within the space of one week-end, it is the most intense stage of the process.

The initial preparatory phase makes it possible to prepare all of the process’s operational conditions. As initiatives are decentralised, i.e., are taken by milieus and territories, a common set of methodological tools must be adopted and this requires adapted human and technical resources:

• the designing of methodological guides (the steps involved in collegial and territorial work; the drafting of experience files; how to use the cartographical synthesis software; the creation of the “Regional Citizens’ Assembly” web site, the co-ordination of internet forums, the designing of proposal booklets, discussing an Ethics Charter, etc.)
• publicising and popularising the idea through the media, public institutions, local councils, non-profit organisations, etc.
• creating a pool of human resources capable of co-ordinating local processes and training sessions for these human resources
• establishing a documentary base