Københavnerting

Københavnerting is part of a larger Copenhagen involvement initiative adopted by the Copenhagen City Council and is intended to help strengthen dialogue and cooperation on the development of Copenhagen. The goal is to strengthen democracy, create community and, not least, to find the best solutions for the city’s development that Copenhageners not only support, but also help to develop.

The Copenhagen Parliament is a multi-year deliberative democracy experiment that experiments with a standing citizens’ parliament format across the city of Copenhagen. Copenhagen, along with Paris, is one of the first cities in the world to work with the format.

In the first year of the Copenhagen Parliament, citizens worked on the key question “How do we develop Copenhagen together with well-being and space for everyone?”. The question was posed jointly by the Employment and Integration Committee, the Culture and Leisure Committee, the Social Committee, the Health and Care Committee, the Technical and Environmental Committee and the Finance Committee.

Preliminary work on the second year of the Copenhagen Parliament is in full swing, with the first session taking place in early 2024.

The members of the first round of the Copenhagen Parliament met over eight sessions between April and June 2023. Together, they developed a set of recommendations and principles for the core problem statement. The Copenhagen Parliament had an independent expert group that managed the members’ learning process with the help of experts and stakeholders. The process will be repeated in 2024.

We Do Democracy is the lead facilitator and independent secretariat for the Copenhagen Parliament in both 2023 and 2024. In collaboration with the administrations in the City of Copenhagen, we have established a strong political mandate across the five committees and administrations, developed core questions and sub-questions. The Copenhagen Tribunal is designed and facilitated in accordance with the OECD principles of representation, independence and arm’s length. In this way, we create a process that not only delivers recommendations to the five committees, but also strengthens democratic engagement among the members of the Copenhagen Parliament.

Københavnertinget is a multi-year project, so not all results can be presented yet.

The Copenhagen Parliament 2023

• 5000 Copenhageners aged 16 to 99+ were invited to participate in the Copenhagen Parliament.
• 1016 wanted to participate, from which a total of 36 members were recruited based on the selection parameters: age, gender, education level, vulnerability and place of residence. The Copenhagen Parliament was representative of Copenhagen’s demographics.
• Københavnertinget 2023 presented their recommendations to the politicians at a launch at Copenhagen City Hall on Thursday. September 19.

Read more about the projects and see the council’s recommendations here

In order to anchor the project and the citizen thing method, a democracy corps has been established and trained among employees in the City of Copenhagen.