Public Participation in Sustainable Development (FR0046)

Empower citizens to exercise scrutiny
and get involved in public decisions on energy transition and sustainable development
Lead institution(s):
Ministry for the Ecological and Solidary Transition
Other stakeholders:
National Council for Ecological Transition (CNTE)
Ministries contributing to the 17 goals: all ministries
Public institutions, particularly: National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies (Insee), France's inclusive public development bank (AFD) Decentralised government departments
Commitment building on commitment no. 26 of the NAP 2015-2017 "Initiate new collaborations with civil society
to develop innovative solutions to meet the challenges
of Climate and Sustainable Development"
OGP principles with which the commitment is associated:
Accountability, participation
Challenges
The energy transition and sustainable development are key issues, and there has been a groundswell of support for them among civil society.
Implementation of the road map charted following the April 2016 environmental conference particularly includes "Launching the revision of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (PNACC-2) by calling on all of the stakeholders".
What is more, an action plan on the 17 sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations in September 2015 needs to be set up in France for the period running until 2030. Work towards these goals must not only prompt the ministries to uphold and draw up the action plan together, but also include civil society, businesses, local authorities and citizens in shaping, promoting and delivering the action plan.
Ambitions
Empower citizens to get involved in public decisions on the energy transition and sustainable development.
The Ministry for the Ecological and Solidary Transition (MTES) would like to press on with the efforts already under way to provide digital tools and involve citizens in drafting the plans to implement international agreements and public policies and monitoring them, not least:
The National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change, by getting all of the stakeholders to contribute to recasting the previous plan;
The inclusive drafting of the Action Plan for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
Enhance the opening up of public environmental data.
Open up new datasets produced by the two ministries, and encourage their re-use;
Give the departments a basic grounding in data and data science;
Build an infrastructure for environmental data: define the reference data and publish
them, including documentation
The road map in detail

Based on the operating arrangements determined by the CNTE, incorporate citizens' proposals in the opinions on the monitoring and assessment of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (PNACC-2) written by the members of the CNTE, and particularly the Specialised Advisory Committee of the National Observatory on the Effects of Global Warming (ONERC) 2018 - 2022
Organise cross-government coordination to address the challenges of the PNACC-2, inform and educate all the public stakeholders in the SDGs to encourage their uptake Action programme 2015 - 2030
Inform, educate and mobilise civil society across the board to play a part in the action plan and make their own contribution
to achieving the SDGs -
Undertake an inventory of the data produced by the two ministries and their operators and make all of this data accessible via Github: mtes-mct.github.io/dataroom/
March 2018

Open up the data:
Of the platform SINOE® déchets9 and encourage re-use.
Bearing on sale of plant protection products10 at the most
micro-scale possible and add them, in a map format in
particular, to the Eaufrance website.
Of the building permit database Sitadel in an open data
format, so that it is easy to re-use and process by an automated processing system (subject to approval from the French Data Protection Authority/CNIL) From summer 2017 to end 2018
Provide citizens with access to environmental impact assessments11 via a co-design approach:
Make sure that each environmental public consultation clearly states the possibility of accessing impact assessments via the dedicated display interface. From January 2017 to January 2018
Geolocate environmental compensatory measures12
in order to reduce the accumulation rate of compensatory measures 2017 - 2018

17. Empower citizens to exercise scrutiny and get involved in public decisions on energy transition and sustainable development

Language of the commitment as it appears in the action plan:

The energy transition and sustainable development are key issues, and there has been a groundswell of support for them among civil society.

Implementation of the road map charted following the April 2016 environmental conference particularly includes "Launching the revision of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (PNACC-2) by calling on all of the stakeholders".

What is more, an action plan on the 17 sustainable development goals adopted by the United Nations in September 2015 needs to be set up in France for the period running until 2030. Work towards these goals must not only prompt the ministries to uphold and draw up the action plan together, but also include civil society, businesses, local authorities and citizens in shaping, promoting and delivering the action plan.

Empower citizens to get involved in public decisions on the energy transition and sustainable development.

The Ministry for the Ecological and Solidary Transition (MTES) would like to press on with the efforts already under way to provide digital tools and involve citizens in drafting the plans to implement international agreements and public policies and monitoring them, not least:

• The National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change, by getting all of the stakeholders to contribute to recasting the previous plan;
• The inclusive drafting of the Action Plan for the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)

Enhance the opening up of public environmental data.

• Open up new datasets produced by the two ministries, and encourage their re-use;
• Give the departments a basic grounding in data and data science;
• Build an infrastructure for environmental data: define the reference data and publish them, including documentation. [64]

Milestones

17.1 Based on the operating arrangements determined by the CNTE, incorporate citizens' proposals in the opinions on the monitoring and assessment of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (PNACC-2) written by the members of the CNTE, and particularly the Specialised Advisory Committee of the National Observatory on the Effects of Global Warming (ONERC)

17.2 Organise cross-government coordination to address the challenges of the PNACC-2, inform and educate all the public stakeholders in the SDGs to encourage their uptake

17.3 Inform, educate and mobilise civil society across the board to play a part in the action plan and make their own contribution to achieving the SDGs

17.4 Undertake an inventory of the data produced by the two ministries and their operators and make all of this data accessible via Github: mtes-mct.github.io/dataroom/

17.5 Open up the data:

• Of the platform SINOE® déchets and encourage re-use.
• Bearing on sale of plant protection products at the most micro-scale possible and add them, in a map format in particular, to the Eaufrance website.
• Of the building permit database Sitadel in an open data format, so that it is easy to re-use and process by an automated processing system (subject to approval from the French Data Protection Authority/CNIL)

Start Date: 2018

End Date: 2020

Context and Objectives

Through this commitment, the government expresses a continued interest in involving civil society in the country’s decision making on key environmental issues, namely energy transition and sustainable development. The previous action plan contained a commitment to involve civil society in the negotiations surrounding and follow-up to the commitments taken at the Conference of the Parties 21. [65] However, the activities undertaken in that framework were time bound, and it is unclear if they contributed to long-lasting changes in government practices. [66]

The current commitment features public participation in the monitoring and assessment of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (PNACC-2). It would also involve the public in the development of the national action plan for the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The second component of the commitment concerns accessibility to various strategic datasets. The diverse ambitions of this commitment result from the merging of two different commitments. Indeed, the initial version of the action plan, made available for comments in 2017, had two separate commitments on open government and environmental issues. [67]

Some components of the commitment lie outside of the action plan’s implementation period. The Ministry for the Ecological and Solidary Transition started working on the first component of the commitment in 2016. The co-construction phase of the PNACC-2 lasted from mid-2016 to mid- 2017. Six working groups gathered approximately 300 participants from civil society, the expert community, and local governments and ministries. They included members of the Conseil National de la Transition Ecologique (CNTE), which is also a multi-stakeholder entity. The working groups developed 33 thematic notes that served to develop the PNACC-2, which was in turn validated by the CNTE. [68] The implementation of the PNACC-2 will be monitored by a special commission of the CNTE. [69] The government took steps toward implementing the second part of the commitment at the beginning of 2018, with the publication of data from the Sitadel database on construction licenses and dates. [70]

The action plan states that this commitment is relevant to public accountability and civic participation. Given the objectives of the various milestones, the IRM researcher, however, considers the commitment to be relevant to the OGP values of access to information and civic participation. There is no clear indication of how civil society would be better equipped to hold government accountable if the commitment were fully implemented.

This commitment contains five different milestones of varying degrees of detail. They target two different—but complementary—objectives. Overall, the commitment, as written, is specific enough to be verifiable. However, while the second segment of the commitment provides sufficient information on the datasets to be opened, the first segment is vague. Milestone 17.1 does not contain sufficient information about the means given to citizens to make proposals or on the way these would be considered. Similarly, Milestone 17.2 mixes information on the PNACC-2 and the SGDs and does not inform the reader whom should be informed and how. The same thing is true for Milestone 17.3, which aims to inform and mobilize “the whole civil society.” Some of the milestones go beyond the time frame of the action plan implementation, which will be a challenge for the assessment of completion at the end of the cycle.

The IRM researcher deems this initiative to have a moderate potential effect. The open data component of the commitment could provide public access to several new datasets, including data on the purchase of pesticides at a micro-scale. Dissemination of such information would be an important step toward more transparency in the environmental field. However, the participation component is formulated too vaguely to be able to assess potential impact.

Next steps

The IRM researcher recommends that the commitment, or at least its milestones, be carried on in the next action plan and that:

• The commitment be split into two separate commitments, one concerning the involvement of civil society in the monitoring of government action regarding climate-related international and national commitments, and the other concerning opening environmentally relevant data;
• More detailed information be presented in the commitment text regarding how civil society will partake in the monitoring and assessment of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change and in the elaboration of the action plan concerning the Sustainable Development Goals.

17. Citizen involvement in decision on energy transition and sustainable development

Aim of the commitment

Climate change is an increasingly politicized issue in France. While citizens are overall concerned about this problem, the solutions proposed by the public authorities have raised additional concerns, either because they were considered insufficient or unfair, as illustrated by the ‘affaire du siècle’, Fridays for Future or Yellow Vests movements. [i] Through this commitment, the government expressed a continued interest in involving civil society and citizens in the country’s decisions on key environmental issues. The second component of the commitment concerns accessibility to various strategic datasets.

Did it open government?

Marginal

According to the government self-assessment, the government’s efforts to incorporate citizens’ proposals in the development of implementation plans of the National Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change (PNACC-2) and the Action Plan for the Sustainable Development Goals was limited to providing the public with information regarding the plans and encouraging them to take part in consultations. There is no evidence of any trainings having been organized to facilitate the participation of civil society.

However, the government reports that these activities were pushed to the side somewhat by France’s first deliberative exercise on a national scale - the Citizen’s Convention on Climate [ii] - which gathered 150 randomly selected citizens who came up with 149 policy proposals to be submitted to a referendum, a vote in parliament or to be implemented directly. [iii] Although some proposals are currently being discussed by Parliament, many civil society organizations expressed concerns that some were not taken forward despite what had been previously announced, [iv] which might generate more distrust in such participatory initiatives than positive outcomes. [v] The 150 citizens of the Convention gave the government a poor grade regarding of the translation of their proposals into policy. [vi]

The second part of the commitment, focusing on open environmental data, contributed to open government in terms of access to information. 20 datasets on the collection and management of household waste relating to the SINOE platform were opened and are available on the AGEME’s open data platform. [vii] Data on the sale of pesticides is also available in open format and made available on Eau France and data.gouv.fr. [viii] The opening of the Sitadel database is subject to the validation of the National Commission on Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL) and could be made available in early 2021, according to the government self-assessment. Civil society actors and journalists have used the data to map the use of pesticides in France, but it is too early to tell if releasing datasets had an impact such as on the use of pesticides or in other policy areas. [ix]

Commitment 20: Lobbying transparency

Aim of the commitment

Gauging the influence of private interests on public decisions requires the public to be able to access information regarding the structure, management and strategies of groups specialized in lobbying. For that purpose, France introduced a digital repository of data on interest representatives in 2016. This commitment aimed at providing access to information through the publication of the content of the register in open data format and of the source code, which would allow anyone to inspect, modify, and enhance the software. It also aimed at involving civil society in brainstorming how the data should be presented, to facilitate the wider public’s access to data on lobby groups.

Did it open government?

Marginal

This commitment is part of a longer reform process that began in 2016 and the lobbying register was created before this action plan, in 2017. However, it has only been mandatory to provide information on lobbying to the register since April 2018 which has led to over 2000 registrations by the end of 2020 (the register had around 100 registrations before April 2018). It contains over 29,000 lobbying activities and is updated annually. [x] The data is publicly available in an open data format and the register’s source code has been available since 2020. The register contains information on personnel, sectors and clients of lobby organizations, their activities and financial resources.

Also, the register has a list of categories of public officials (such as member of government, parliamentarian, advisor to the president) regarding whom a communication may constitute an action of representation of interests, available in HTML but not in a reusable open format. [xi]

During the course of the action plan implementation period, the High Authority for Transparency of Public Life (HATVP) organized a Forum Open d’État on the use of the register data and partnered with the association Latitudes to develop a global visualization of this data (but there is no evidence of visualizations being produced). [xii]

While there was a huge increase in the number of registrations and therefore a huge increase in the amount of information available about lobbying activities compared to before the implementation of the commitment, this may be simply due to the implementation of the law over time. In any case, Transparency International France has reused the information for its monitoring tool Integrity Watch France which provides an analytical overview of the data using graphs and tables and is free to browse and search. [xiii] For example, it showed that the annual lobby budget of registered organizations can range between €63 million and €96 million. [xiv]

However, as identified in the IRM Design Report, limitations of the Sapin II legal framework mean that lobbyists only need to update the register once a year, some organizations do not have to register (i.e. religious organizations, associations of elected, representatives), and public officials do not have to report their meetings with interest representatives. [xv] The legal framework for the lobbying register therefore needs to be updated to ensure the lobby register can provide better information for more effective lobbying transparency in France. Civil society organizations stated that the current changes are superficial in relation to the reality of lobbying in French politics. [xvi] Lastly, Transparency International France regrets that the HATVP lacks the human resources to properly verify the accuracy of the information registered. [xvii] These limitations point to a marginal assessment in terms of opening government.