Carsten Berg

Political Scientist, 2021-2022 Berggruen Fellow

Carsten Berg is a political scientist working in particular in the field of deliberative and participatory democracy at transnational level.

He advises on a regular basis national parliaments, EU institutions and international organizations and has run several successful citizens’ initiatives on democratic reform and the protection of the environment. In 2002-2003, Carsten Berg was actively involved in the Convention on the Future of Europe where he successfully contributed to the incorporation in the EU Treaties of the European Citizens’ Initiative (ECI), the world’s first and only instrument of transnational participatory democracy. He has since been engaged in the promotion of transnational democracy as director of the ECI Association.

He is co-founder of several organizations such as Democracy International and Democracy R&D. Moreover, he is also very active in the development of new instruments of deliberative democracy and co-designed the world’s first permanent randomly selected Citizens’ Assembly in Eastern Belgium.

As a Berggruen Fellow he has been coordinating the Transnational Democracy Observatory at the EUI in Florence and has evaluated the transnational randomly selected citizens’ panels organized in the context of the Conference on the Future of Europe. His ongoing writings are based on these assessments and focus in particular on the conception of a permanent randomly selected Citizens’ Assembly at EU level.”

By Carsten Berg

Berggruen Fellows Aim to Reinvent Governance, Imagine Radically Different Futures for Global Systems and Institutions

New Berggruen Institute Report: Citizens’ Panels Prove Deliberative Democracy Can Work for EU

Citizens' Panels Show the Way Ahead for Transnational Democracy