Against this background, PHOENIX’s ambition to enhance citizen participation to address environmental issues acquires deep value. To reach its objective, PHOENIX moves from the existing deliberative and participatory traditions that analysed and tested multiple forms of participation, along with their implications and effects on individual behaviour.

On the basis of the research conducted by the partners involved in the diagnostic phase of the project, the Institute of Public Goods and Policies (IPP) of the Spanish National Research Council (CSIC) is going to propose new forms of participation that will help address the environmental challenges we face today. IPP’s contribution to the PHOENIX project revolves around the design and support of a portfolio of participatory processes. Our task consists in renewing different consolidated methodologies of participation and deliberation by combining several of their operating tools.

Our final objective is to build innovative participatory and deliberative processes, new forms of participation that allow us to face, in a more inclusive and comprehensive way, the challenges of the European Green Deal. We call these new participatory processes, built from the analysis of different Democratic Innovations (such as Participatory Budgets, Public Debate, National Conferences or Citizen Assemblies), Enriched Democratic Innovations.

The innovations that we propose have to do with combining methodologies and tools used in these Democratic Innovations, generating a system of different interactions. We have called this new participatory and deliberative system ‘the PHOENIX Tangram’. Originating from the Chinese tradition, the Tangram is a puzzle made of seven geometric shapes, called ‘tans’, which can be arranged together to suggest an amazing variety of forms.

PHOENIX adopts this visual reference to imagine how a series of participatory and deliberative methodologies (such as the Participatory Budgeting or the Citizen Assemblies) and the tools that are used in them, constitute the tans that can be combined in order to design various forms of Enriched Democratic Innovations (the forms, this is what we will have to imagine). Finally, our aim is to use these ‘forms’ in different territories and at different administrative levels to face the challenges of the European Green Deal in different situated contexts.

As PHOENIX plans to test participatory and deliberative practices in 11 different pilots, the outcome of our work will therefore be 11 tangrams made for 11 different territories spread throughout Europe. The tangrams will be created according to an analysis that considers the social, political, territorial and environmental contexts of the areas that will host the pilots. This will allow us to implement participatory and deliberative processes able to respond to the specificities of those territories.

By crossing the systematisation of the participatory and deliberative tradition and its recent innovations, territorial analysis and collaborative design, we hope to design different participatory processes that respond to different variables, different challenges and, of course, different needs. In other words, we will develop a portfolio that will allow administrations in the future to select tools and participatory processes capable of addressing the challenges within the environmental conditions they face at a given time.

In addition (and coherently with our mission), the design of these systems (the tangrams) will happen within a participatory dynamic; in each pilot territory for which a participatory process is going to be designed, there will be a Territorial Commission for Co-Design made up of different actors. In the end, this Territorial Commission for Co-Design will design the participatory system based on the information, analysis and proposals that we will share with them.