Across Europe there is a rise of political movements that claim to challenge liberal elites and speak for the 'ordinary person' - movements that can be loosely categorised as 'populist'. Many of these movements have undesirable tendencies. The Populism and Civic Engagement project (PACE), with others, aims to combat the negative tendencies of populist movements, to build upon the lessons of positive examples (such as Reykjavik), and hence play a part in constructing a firmer democratic and institutional foundation for the citizens of Europe. PACE will analyse, in detail, the type, growth and consequences of such movements in terms of their particular characteristics and context. From this, it will analyse the causes of these movements and their specific challenges to liberal democracy a possibilistic analysis to complement survey/statistical approaches. In particular, it will focus on transitions in these movements (especially changes in leadership) as well as how they relate to other kinds of movements and the liberal reaction. PACE will propose responses to these challenges, developing risk-analyses for each kind of response, each kind of movement and the type of transition. For this, it will employ the agent-based simulation of political processes and attitudes to allow for thorough risk analyses to be made. Throughout the project, it will engage with citizens and policy actors, especially groups under-represented in public affairs, face-face and via new forms of democratic participation appropriate to our digital age to help guide the project and to comment on its outputs. It will develop new tools, based on machine-learning algorithms for identifying and tracking populist narratives and to aid online consultation. It will result in specific interventions aimed at: the public, politicians, activists and educators. It will look further into the future, developing new visions concerning how we could respond to populism and it will warn about longer-term trends.

The European Commission’s Mission for “100 Climate-neutral and Smart Cities by 2030” (“the Cities Mission”) seeks to accelerate Europe’s climate action commitments as part of the European Green Deal, whose ambition is to make Europe the first climate-neutral continent by 2050. The Cities Mission’s central tenet is to elevate and deepen the commitment to pursue systemic change through research and innovation, setting an ambition for cities of unprecedented scope and scale. In order to achieve such effects, a demand-driven Mission Platform has been established to provide tailored assistance and services to participating cities and those learning from them. As a part of the Horizon 2020 Work Programme, Building a low-carbon, climate resilient future: Green Deal call, the “LC-GD- 1-2-2020: Towards Climate-Neutral and Socially Innovative Cities” topic selected the four-year project NetZeroCities to establish the Mission Platform, which began work at the same time as the formal establishment of the Cities Mission, in October 2021. The scope of work presented herein will comprise the second Specific Grant Agreement (SGA2-NZC) development under the Framework Partnership Agreement FPA-NZC for the Mission Platform to scale and continue operations through 2027. Activities primarily focus on two objectives: the first to reinforce the support received by cities selected to participate in the Mission on financing their roadmap of activities towards climate neutrality, and the second to develop basic Mission Platform services for cities who are willing to commit to climate neutrality on a longer timescale than the Cities Mission.

AI and big data are fundamentally interwoven into our societies, culture and indeed into our expectations and conceptions of democratic governance and exchange. They can also, however, contribute to an environment for citizens that is distinctly anti-democratic. KT4D will harness the benefits of an understanding of these as knowledge technologies to foster more inclusive civic participation in democracy. To achieve this, we will develop and validate tools, guidelines and a Digital Democracy Lab demonstrators platform. These results will be validated across three user needs scenarios: 1) building capacity for citizens and citizen-facing Civil Society Organisations (CSOs); 2) creating regulatory tools and services for Policy and CSOs; and 3) improving awareness of how to design ethically and mindfully for democracy principles in academic and industrial software development. Our work is underpinned by the understanding that to fully address the social and fundamental rights costs of AI and big data, we need more than just technological fixes, we need more than just technological fixes, we need to address the underlying cultural influences and barriers. Most importantly, we understand the threats to democracy of AI and big data not only through the nature of what they do, but via the cultural disruptions they create with power dynamics they shift, their tendency toward opacity, and the speed at which they change. KT4D’s ambitious and disruptive results will drive transformation in how democracy and civic participation are facilitated in the face of rapidly changing knowledge technologies, enabling actors across society to capitalise on the many benefits these technologies can bring in terms of community empowerment, social integration, individual agency, and trust in both institutions and technological instruments, while confidently mitigating potential ethical, legal and cultural risks.

NetZeroCities (NZC) is designed to pursue the ambition of the report from the Mission Board for Climate Neutral and Smart Cities, as part of a broader European ambition to achieve climate neutrality before 2050. This ambition represents a substantial elevation of the degrees of decarbonisation and the timescale for achieving it. For all cities achieving this level of impact is an extraordinary undertaking and would require profound changes in how policies, projects and programmes are advanced by cities, with the direction and support of senior governments. NZC connects and builds beyond established programmes and experimental initiatives. The NetZeroCities consortium is build based on partners? expertise, experience, and access to a very large network of cities of all sizes and maturity throughout Europe. It has an excellent balance of partner typologies, a great geographical coverage allowing presence and activity all throughout Europe, and thanks to that, its approach goes beyond current state-of-the-art. NetZeroCities will create a programme tailored to the specific conditions of each city. All the services and thematic expertise will be aggregated and co-designed through a NZC one-stop-shop Platform and the digital portal and smart repository for impact measurement, capacity building and knowledge/tools dissemination. Cities will benefit from an intensive support relationship of dedicated City Guides to navigate the platform and ensure city needs are adequately understood and addressed. NetZeroCities will support pilots in 30 European cities and, in subsequent rounds of engagement, more than 100 cities to achieving carbon neutrality by 2030 (medium-term) and 2050 (long term) respectively, by developing and deploying an integral approach to support climate-neutral transformation in cities. This will be achieved through the co-design and organisation of services, including the Climate-neutral City Contract as an enabling instrument.

Nets4Dem puts forward a Network of Networks approach to establish and develop a European network of practitioners and researchers in the field of democracy, civic deliberation, participation and citizenship education. The Consortium, brings together widely networked organisations with long-term expertise in democratic innovation across a broad range of areas (including digital democracy, rule of law, climate change, also through cultural and creative approach). It is composed of umbrella organisations, that will draw on their already existing networks to contribute to the call outcomes. The unique approach that Nets4Dem puts forward is to ‘weave’ more and better connections between existing actors and networks already active in the wider democracy field, taking advantage of each other’s strengths and reducing duplication. Nets4Dem will focus its efforts on four main objectives: (1) creating, fostering and sustaining stronger Network of policy makers, practitioners and researchers; (2) systematizing and connecting the fragmented knowledge on democratic innovation and governance research; (3) establishing a coordinated European approach to promote systematic accessibility of democratic innovation; (4) raising the ambition of policy making through policy recommendations to strengthen democracy at all levels of governance. We will seek to address the challenges we’ve identified: the need for better collaboration and networking in the democratic field, the need to connect existing knowledge on democracy and governance and make it more accessible, so that policymakers and practitioners are better equipped to the address complex challenges they are facing for inclusive societies and more resilient democracy To address these and potential new challenges, substantial efforts are required from researchers, practitioners, policy makers and citizens. One of the most impactful ways to support this work is by connecting the efforts of all those who are pursuing the same goal