Safeguarding democratic resilience cannot be limited to Member States and EU institutions. When democratic institutions weaken, civil society, including independent media, is often the first line of defence and the last bastion.
Civil society performs a crucial watchdog function, holds those in power accountable, and works directly with citizens to help them navigate pressures on democracy. In short, civil society is an integral part of democratic infrastructure and resilience itself: the safeguards that rely on them span from monitoring elections, to countering information manipulation, to improving citizen participation in decision-making processes.
The European Democracy Shield acknowledges this by proposing the establishment of a Stakeholder Platform for ‘non-institutional stakeholders’ as part of the new European Centre for Democratic Resilience (ECDR) with three main aims:
- To bring a broad set of stakeholders and communities together to enable contributions and feed them into the Centre’s work;
- To facilitate the exchange of information, expertise and advice;
- To support the dissemination of outputs, including research.
Enthusiasm for the Stakeholder Platform is widespread. But how should it be formed? And what should it look like? Civil society organisations often engage in a large number of consultation processes. However, they are rarely able to feed into the conceptualisation and development of such mechanisms before they are launched. This brief will propose a series of recommendations regarding the format and content of the Platform, in order for it to be more than a standard consultation platform and for it to effectively contribute to the implementation of the Democracy Shield, and strengthen democratic resilience by extension.
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