Societal and political engagement of young people in environmental issues – STEP

When: June 2015 – December 2017

Where: Various countries

Project description

The STEP project addresses the need of public organisations to effectively open their decision-making procedures that have an environmental impact to young people. The overall objective of the project is to develop and pilot test an e-Participation cloud platform, enhanced with web / social media mining, gamification, machine translation, and visualisation features, which will promote the societal and political participation of young people in the decision-making processes on environmental issues.

Four pilots in an operational environment had been selected for the deployment of STEP solution in 4 locations: Italy, Spain, Greece, and Turkey, with the participation of one regional authority, 3 municipalities, and an association of municipalities. The pilots were expected to involve testing by 8.200 young users and 85 policy makers.

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Aim and objectives:

The aim of the project was to develop and test an e-Participation cloud platform, which will promote the societal and political participation of young people in the decision-making processes on environmental issues.

Objectives:

To enable public authorities to quickly open their decision-making processes to young people.
To enable young citizens to participate in decision-making on issues with environmental impact.
To develop engagement and motivation strategies for increasing youth participation in environmental decision making.
To pilot test the services in an operational environment in terms of technical, organisational and legal feasibility, with the participation of end users (young citizens) and policy makers.
To assess the usability, effectiveness and impact of the project in embedding open engagement in public sector processes, and to identity the key barriers for wide scale deployment.
To ensure appropriate dissemination and realistic exploitation of project activities and results.

Participating organisations: