Following his recent appointment as a F.R.S.-FNRS qualified researcher, Vincent Jacquet, affiliated to the Transition Research Institute of UNamur, has just been awarded a prestigious ERC Starting Grant of nearly 1.5 million euros for his CITIZEN_IMPACT project.
CITIZEN_IMPACT focuses on citizen participation and its impact on solving the crisis of democracy. What are the solutions to the crisis of the democratic system? Are citizens' assemblies effective in reducing the crisis? Is citizen participation really taken into account in political decisions?
"Experiences of citizens' assemblies in Europe are increasingly regularly organised by public authorities, either directly by parliaments, or by individual ministers, always with the overall message that we are experiencing a democratic crisis and a lack of confidence in the citizen. They have been scrutinised in the past, from the inside. Now we are in a phase where each level of power has experimented with this type of device.
The question of the impact of these citizens' assemblies now arises. Do we continue these experiments as they are? Will these citizens' assemblies allow for a fundamental transformation of the functioning of the political system beyond global slogans?"
Consequently, the CITIZEN_IMPACT project proposes a radically new approach to the role and contribution of such participatory and deliberative procedures in contemporary representative democracies. It aims to develop a new multi-dimensional conceptualisation of the impact of such citizens' assemblies: the direct impact on public policy, the indirect impact on civil society and the discursive impact on the public sphere.
This project is the result of teamwork at the UNamur from the project's inception to ERC grant.
Vincent Jacquet, FNRS qualified researcher
The ERC enables researchers to develop exploratory research projects at the frontiers of knowledge in all fields of science and technology. The only selection criterion is the scientific excellence of the project and the applicant. The ERC CITIZEN_IMPACT starting grant will enable Vincent Jacquet to develop his team within the Transition Research Institute with the recruitment of three new post-doctoral researchers.
Congratulations!
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon Europe research and innovation programme (grant agreement n° 101077920).
The Transitions research institute
The TRANSITIONS Institute aims at exploring the different ways in which nature and human societies undergo processes, periods, and impacts of transitions, in an unprecedented manner, which requires a radical change in our former ethical, political and social patterns.
TRANSITIONS researches emphasize the main fields wherein transitions are of a critical significance: environment, economics, development, mobility, digital landscapes, politics, education, health, justice and social cohesion. These fields are examined in interdisciplinary researches using a combination of methods, concepts and theories.
Thanks to their recognized expertise at an international and national level (F.R.S.-FNRS, European Union, Federal State, Walloon Region, etc.), the members of the Transitions Institute develop “primary research” projects but also “research-action” projects in the service of society.