AGENDA (2022-2025)

 

Abstract

 

AGENDA invites students, citizens and practitioners to explore the EU's hybrid fabric of governance and future strands for developing its
democratic decision-making processes. Building on research with regard to the early phases of the EU's policy cycle and the EU treaties'
normative setting on policy initiation and the right of legislative initiative, AGENDA looks at existing and possible opportunity structures for
legislative agenda-setting and -shaping in the EU. AGENDA builds on the commitments made by candidates in the run up to the 2019
European elections and the support for extending the right of initiative provided by Commission's president in her Political Guidelines.
Taking on these ideas, our objective is to learn, discuss and analyze how the right of initiative at the EU level compares with the situation in
the Member States, how institutions have developed the use of the right to request legislative initiative, how further instruments for
legislative agenda-setting contribute to shape the EU's political agenda, and how the potential widening of the circle of stakeholders for
initiating policy and legislation affects the EU's functioning in terms of democracy, efficiency, effectiveness and transparency. We will
debate and assess these dimensions of the right of initiative by encouraging an interdisciplinary dialogue between scholars of the social
sciences, the humanities and law as well as practitioners from parliaments, governments, civil society and administration at all levels of EU
governance. Overall, AGENDA will stimulate a participatory form of analysis and evaluation of possible channels, sender-addresseerelations
and conditions of voice and influence via formal and informal mechanisms and procedures. We contribute to the debate on the
future of supranational and inclusive governance, to inform the public debate about legislative agenda-setting in the EU, and to
disseminate our findings to practitioners, EU officials, and civil society.