Think Global – Act Local: Education for Democracy

A Joint Meeting of the Council of Europe Network of Coordinators for Education for Democratic Citizenship and Human Rights Education and of the Pedagogical Club of European Capitals

22 octobre 2014, Strasbourg ; France

Speech By Gaye Doganoglu, Congress Vice-President, Spokesperson of the ELDW

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I would like to welcome you all to this extraordinary event in Strasbourg, which brings together Council of Europe Network of Coordinators for Education for Democracy and the Pedagogical Club of European Capitals. I say it is extraordinary, because this is a unique opportunity for those working for a common goal, a more democratic and accessible education policy at sub-national, national and international level; an opportunity to come together and discuss possible vertical cooperation in the field of education, share best practices, and current challenges for citizenship and human rights education in Europe. My name is Gaye Doganoglu and I am here today to represent the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities, which is a pan-European political assembly within the Council of Europe, consisting of 636 elected members from the 47 member states.

In my role as Member of the Congress, I would like to thank the Department for Citizenship and Human Rights Education for organising us a platform for discussion today, and express the support of the Congress for the comprehensive work on education for democracy that is being done under the auspices of the Council of Europe, in particular for the work of the Steering Committee for Educational Policy and Practice and of the Network of Coordinators. We all know it is a hard work to do in times of the financial crisis when national governments are increasingly reluctant to invest in education for democratic culture.

It is part of this difficult task, especially for local and regional authorities, who are placed the closest to citizens, to educate inhabitants on their democratic and human rights, teach them how to give effect to their rights as citizens and inform them about the work of international organisations who stand out for the protection and promotion of those rights. I would like to use the opportunity to talk about a project of the Council of Europe which can be a pertinent tool for completing that mission: the European Local Democracy Week, or ELDW as we call it. For those who haven’t heard about it yet, ELDW is an annual pan-European event, launched in 2007, which is coordinated by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities. The aim of the ELDW is to promote and foster democratic participation at local level in Europe, in particular, to raise citizens’ awareness of how local authorities operate, and inform them of the opportunities for taking part in decision-making at the grassroots level. The main targets of the project are local and regional authorities, and their associations, who are encouraged to plan and organise participatory activities for citizens in the frame of the ELDW. To be part of this initiative, communities have to register on the official website, and use the visual identity of the ELDW when implementing activities related to the current theme of the Democracy Week. The main topic for the 2014 edition is “Participatory democracy: sharing, proposing, deciding”. The official Week of Local Democracy took place last week, between the 13 and 19 October. According to provisional statistics, 139 participants from 23 countries participated this year and organised around 400 activities – nearly 300 of those happened in Russia.

Dear Participants, as members of the Coordinators’ Network and the Pedagogical Group of European Capitals, you have a great potential to use the ELDW project as a tool for boosting citizen participation and connect inhabitants with the European community. Therefore, as Spokesperson of the European Local Democracy Week, I would like to encourage you to take part in this initiative and disseminate information on the ELDW, using the website and the leaflet you can find in the back of the room.

If the ELDW initiative is one way for local and regional authorities to promote citizenship and human rights education, another way is to establish inter-municipal cooperation and synergies between different education policies, in order to foster high quality education. For this, we have an excellent example with us here, the Pedagogical Group of European Capitals, which has been working for many years for developing multilateral education projects on the sub-state level, and therefore deserves the full support of the Council of Europe and its Congress. As Member of the Municipal Council of Konyaalti/Antalya in Turkey, I am a direct witness of the practical importance of such initiatives. Own experience in Turkey…

Finally, I would like to thank you once again for inviting me to contribute to the discussion today. I had a very good impression of the last meeting of the Coordinators’ Network in Baku, which I participated in June, and I hope we can continue this fruitful cooperation with the Directorate of Democracy. I am looking forward to hearing about the latest developments, as well as your experience and opinion on possibilities and challenges in the field of Education for Democracy.