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eMPOWER: eParticipation, ePetitioning and Environment in One Dose!16. July 2010 – 14:25 by POLITECH |
eMPOWER is an eParticipation Trial Project co-funded by the European Commission under the EU eParticipation Preparatory Action. eMPOWER aims to motivate and strengthen the involvement of NGOs and citizens in the decision-making process on environmental issues at a national and the European levels by providing tools for supporting citizens’ participation and collection of signatures to promote relevant public initiatives and demands of civil society through ePetitions.
Therefore, eMPOWER is a very unique project, which in fact combines 3 domains: (1) eParticipation, (2) ePetitioning and (3) environment. But this is not the main reason why eMPOWER is so distinct.
Environmental issues have become one of the most important topics and problems in the last decade. In addition, the global environment will become the most significant global issue within this century. Consequently, the environment will, or rather already is, an important public policy matter. However, it is important at the same time to realize and introduce policy-making from a new participative and eParticipation approach. Policy-making have been undergoing slow but strong modifications from top-down to bottom-up policy-making scheme. Therefore, citizens are given various tools at their disposal to influence and propose new legislations, eMPOWER and its ePetitioning tool being one of them.
