The EGD transition pathway is a major challenge for Europe, whose targets were elevated following the pandemic outbreak. Its ambitions require joint efforts to harmonise diverse contexts and visions of humans/nature's relation. Citizens' engagement, as envisioned in the EU Democracy Action Plan, is a pre-condition for institutional policies and projects' success, as behavioural changes and transformations in large populations' lifestyles and expectations are vital for the EGD's implementation. PHOENIX, anchored to the pictographic idea of a collective resurrection (stronger and more resilient) from the ashes of a shared tragedy, connects a multidisciplinary group of 15 partners from the different macro-regions of Europe. It builds on a rich, consolidated tradition of participatory processes and refined deliberative methodologies successfully experimented in different policy-making domains, considering they are necessary tools, but not sufficient ones, when it comes to facing the ambitious goals related to ecological transition patterns. Elaborating on their lesson learned, PHOENIX designs an iterative process to increase the transformative potential of Democratic Innovations to address specific topics of the EGD. Through a portfolio of sound methodologies and tools, we will enrich them, augmenting their quality of deliberation and the capacity to foster the readiness to change and the commitment of different actors. PHOENIX tailors and tests Enriched Democratic Innovations (EDIs) in 11 pilots in 7 countries, monitoring and carefully assessing the systemic approach?s capacity elaborated to adapt to a diverse range of socio-cultural and environmental contexts, and different administrative levels. Finally, it supports the mainstreaming, scalability and adaptability of the methodologies tested and assessed in the pilots, leveraging an inter-pilot dialogue grounded on evidence-based results, and building collectively a series of Policy Recommendations.

Emerging challenges of demographic change and of digitisation of societies call for new innovative models of public governance. Citizens and other civil and private sector actors take a more active and responsive role in ensuring prosperity, a secure living environment and economic growth. Involving citizens in co-creation of public services while reducing administrative burden has become an important social and economic asset in innovative public governance. To significantly reduce administrative burdens, the once-only principle (OOP) demands public administrations to request key data of citizens and businesses only once, and to internally share these data, while respecting data protection and privacy regulations. However, this principle also bears a number of organisational, legal, socio-economic and technical challenges to finally harvest the full benefits and to reach the digital by default status. SCOOP4C will investigate, discuss and disseminate how the OOP can be implemented in public service provisioning in order to significantly reduce administrative burden and simplify administrative procedures for citizens while reusing data among public administration with the control and consent of citizens. In particular, SCOOP4C will (1) build up and sustain a stakeholder community; (2) identify, collect and share existing good practices of once-only implementations for citizens and establish a body of knowledge; (3) discuss challenges, needs and benefits of the OOP in co-creation and public service provisioning contexts involving citizens; (4) develop policy recommendations towards a necessary paradigm change to build trust in the once-only implementations; (5) identify relevant stakeholders and develop a strategic stakeholder engagement plan to ensure sustainable implementations of the OOP achieving wide outreach; and (6) develop a tangible roadmap of areas of actions for R&I to implement, diffuse and sustain implementations of the OOP.