Learn everything you need to know about involving Stakeholders in the policy making process; from stakeholder consultation to the more participatory approach of stakeholder/citizen engagement.

The first session of this online course provides a comprehensive overview of Stakeholder (SH) consultation its methods, tools and processes. It demonstrates how SH consultation should be applied in practice.

Following the sequential phases of a consultation activity, namely, the planning, design, implementation, reporting and informing, the course provides an in-depth understanding of how to use the various methods and tools to consult Stakeholders. Using practical sessions including examples, case studies and exercises, the course enhances participants’ capacity to draft fit for purpose and state of the art public consultation questionnaires. And finally, the first session concludes by discussing how to ensure that SH input can provide valuable evidence for Impact Assessments and Evaluations.

The next two sessions encourage participants to move beyond the typical stakeholder consultation and explore how to actively engage stakeholders and citizens in co-creating policies at all levels of governance.

The course starts by addressing the common objections to participation (Citizen participation? Hell no!) and then showcases inspiring instances of citizen engagement throughout Europe. Then, it explores a variety cutting edge tools and methods which can be used to go beyond the usual suspects, explore how to, effectively and concretely, design a participatory process, and how to weave citizen participation into the policymaking process. It explores how to integrate participation into the policy making culture of public authorities. The course concludes by discussing how you can start deploying and/or experimenting with more engaging co-creation processes in your own institution.

You will learn:

How to identify all the relevant stakeholders
How to design an effective consultation strategy to reach out to all relevant stakeholders
How to select the appropriate consultation methods and tools
How to perform basic analysis of data, report on the findings and inform policy making
How to transfer existing inspiring co-creation practices from elsewhere to your own institution
How to design a citizen participation process
How to go beyond the usual suspects
How to integrate citizen participation within a policymaking process
How to make citizen participation a new culture of policymaking
How to experiment with citizen participation methods and tools
The course includes inspiring practices from all over Europe, concrete tools and methods to enable participation, a provocative serious game, and tips & tricks for experimentation.