The European Citizens’ Initiative : a more diversified citizen participation at the European level ? Online participatory practices

The ECI is described as the first transnational agenda-setting citizen tool (Smith, 2012). Signatures are collected online on a centralized institutional platform but information campaigns are made via independent and ad hoc websites. After 4 years of existence, this online device already allows to observe the creation of a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) made up of numerous organizers exchanging good practices on various types of platforms. The scale of the device indeed requires the creation of numerous spaces of interaction and participation such as pages on social media, exchange platforms for information and collaboration tools (for the administrators) but also structures of assistance as ECI Campaign, which is a grassroots coalition of democracy advocates (120 European NGOs). Through the study of the participative practices around selected ECIs (2 years of participant observation, interviews, online observation), we analyze 1) how ECIs revitalize national and European networks of associations by creating links, thereby sustaining the Europeanization of the associative field; 2) which types of practices bring associations and active citizens to develop or to use media, technical and informative skills (information campaigns and recruitment on social media, creation of national relay networks, website design, transnational and multilingual communication); and 3) how European institutional participation, which was previously mostly limited to industrial, financial or technical lobbying groups, becomes increasingly diversified, , in particular thanks to online means that give more room to the debates carried on by associations and already taking place on other levels. We shall show that the ECI provides the transnational civil society with a real opportunity for networking and mobilization and that it can work as a catalyst to establish « transnational discursive spheres » (Knaut and Keller, 2012) within which knowledge on specific policies can be developed.