DG SANCO’s Healthy Democracy Process: what progress so far?

Background

The Directorate General for Health & Consumers launched its Healthy Democracy process in 2006 in a climate of steadily growing pressure on EU institutions to increase their transparency and open up their working processes to be more participatory and inclusive of stakeholder input.

In the time span, DG SANCO has been working on the top 10 recommendations of the Peer Review Group.

In March 2009, DG SANCO published the Healthy Democracy Progress Report which lays out the results so far and the challenges that are expected to come up against.

This Report is said to be used to establish the DG’s agenda of priorities on stakeholder involvement for the next 5 years.

Summary

Of the 41 recommendations that the process yielded, ten were singled out by the Directorate General as essential to its goal of comprehensive stakeholder involvement and where concrete progress was considered to be possible.

DG SANCO considers that progress has been made on these recommendations:
 setting up of the Stakeholder Dialogue Group;
 critically reflecting upon the issues of stakeholder asymmetries, representativeness and engaging the unengaged;
 improving forward planning by publishing the DG’s Annual Management Plan and Units’ Management Plans;
 enhancing the transparency of comitology procedures through the setting up and the publication of the Comitology Planner.

Given the incremental and evolutionary character of mainstreaming stakeholder participation and diversifying its interlocutors, DG SANCO identified three principal challenges:
 legitimacy and accountability at national level as a prerequisite for successful stakeholder diversification and broader, more inclusive participation at EU level;
 the temporal aspect: establishing open governance processes requires time and imposes sustained coherent action over the long term if they are to settle as given in EU institutional culture.
 the growing complexity of policy issues manifested in cross-cutting impact areas imposes the need for stakeholder diversification beyond the obvious sectors.

For further information

 The report is also available at the webpage of SANCO’s Stakeholder Dialogue Group which has endorsed the paper’s conclusions.