Democracy – an interactive conference on the opportunities, limitations and future prospects of participatory democracy and active citizenship in Sweden, Europe and worldwide.

How can we inspire citizens to take a more active part in shaping their own future? Welcome to engage in this full day conference at Europahuset, the House of Europe in Stockholm. The aim is to generate proposals that meet current challenges and that contribute to more participatory democracy.

Together with leading politicians, researchers and representatives of the civil society we will discuss measures to strengthen the ties between the political institutions and citizens locally, regionally, nationally and transnationally.

This conference intends to strengthen the awareness and knowledge of an important but often neglected policy area, democratic politics. In order to develop a priority list of concrete democratic political reform proposals, this event gathers leading and knowledgeable representatives of politics, public administration, the media, academia, business sector and civil society.

The morning sessions will consist of three seminars that cover the different political levels – from local to global. In the afternoon, the participants will take part in workshops where suggestions from the morning sessions are discussed and voted on, in order to draft concrete reform priorities and proposals.

The discussions will connect to two recent government inquiries: Låt fler forma framtiden (SOU2016: 5) and EU på hemmaplan (SOU2016: 10) that analyse the situation in Sweden and the EU as regards active citizenship and participatory democracy.

This conference is a collaboration between the EU Commission in Sweden, International IDEA, the Embassy of Switzerland and Demokratiskolan (the Democracy School at Studiefrämjandet).