Bottom-Up Initiatives for a Living Democracy and Fair Futures in Digitalisation and Migration (BUILD FAIR) is a cross-border civic engagement project taking place in five EU Member States (Czech Republic, Estonia, Ireland, Romania, and Spain). The project brings a justice-oriented perspective to the forefront of two policy areas: digitalisation and migration and asylum policy. The overall objective is to strengthen public debate between countries on fairness within EU digital and migration policies and to meaningfully integrate the views of citizens and stakeholders into the design of national and EU-level policy solutions.
The project is structured as a one-way bottom-up consultation process. During the consultation phase, key justice challenges are mapped through citizen consultations and national stakeholder roundtables, followed by focus group discussions and international citizen consultations. In the engagement and dissemination phase, the findings are brought into wider public debate through participatory events and workshops, supported by media engagements. Additionally, an international collection of women’s experience stories will be compiled to highlight issues with inequality in digitalisation.
In the advocacy phase, input from citizens and stakeholders is synthesized into two policy briefs with actionable recommendations (fair digital public services; fairer asylum policy). The results will be discussed in workshops with policymakers, and the project concludes with a conference in Brussels, where the findings and recommendations will be presented to EU-level stakeholders, journalists, and decision-makers.