Cohesion Policy showcasing at the 2nd Citizen Engagement Festival

Cohesion Policy delivers for citizens and they should be more directly involved in implementing its projects and disseminating its results. With the aim to convey this message DG REGIO will take part in the 2^nd Citizen Engagement Festival organised by the Joint Research Centre in Brussels on 9 and 10 December 2019. The festival will gather practitioners in the field of citizen engagement to discuss and exchange good practice and aims to strengthen understanding of the role of citizen engagement across the policy cycle.

DG REGIO will present in particular two of its pilot initatives bringing more transparency and civic monitoring of projects on the ground, namely the Integrity Pacts and At the School of Open Cohesion.

The project ‘Integrity Pacts – Civil Control Mechanism for Safeguarding EU Funds’ currently covers 18 projects co-funded with cohesion policy funding in 11 Member States where citizens, civil society, public institutions and private companies join forces to ensure more transparency, efficiency and accountability of public investment and related projects.  

At the school of Open Cohesion is an educational challenge and a Massive Online Open Course designed for high-school students. It promotes the engagement of students in monitoring the effectiveness of EU cohesion policy investments via the use of public open data. The initiative also aims at fostering the culture of active citizenship, promoting accountability for public institutions and raising awareness of Cohesion Policy among young people. The educational challenge is coupled with a competition: participating students will produce a communication product to illustrate the results of their work and compete with their peers nationally and at European level.