Shaping Andorra's future

What should Andorra be like in 2050? There are many ways to approach this question, all of which are complementary. The contribution of the “Tracing the Future of Andorra in a Changing World” project is to bring the citizens' vision to this reflection. To do this, we have designed a deliberative foresight project that aims to complement the diagnosis we already conducted in Andorra: future challenges.

In that case, we managed to collect the voice of what is known in the world of citizen participation as organized civil society (public and quasi-public institutions and the association network), but we were unable to collect the voices of citizens who are not affiliated with any entity. Now, with this new project, we have collected it in two different ways. To start, with a first phase of participatory workshops where up to two hundred people (a hundred of them unaffiliated) have expressed their desired future for Andorra and have begun to think about measures to achieve it. But most importantly, with a second phase of the project in which we have succeeded in establishing the first citizen assembly in Andorra's history. In this assembly, fifty citizens representative of the country's entire sociodemographic makeup (selected from five hundred people interested in participating) debated the country's future over six sessions and a total of about twenty hours: validating and prioritizing the conclusions of the first phase and of “Future Challenges” debating the most complex or even incompatible future challenges, delving deeper into those future scenarios considered most necessary to achieve, and finally drafting a document of recommendations that will be submitted to the General Council.

Andorra Research + Innovation's contribution to this project has been to serve as its technical secretariat. Thus, we participated in the project's design, proposed the methodology to be followed, and took on the facilitation of the debates, the analysis of the information, and the reporting of the results to the project's steering committee (composed of representatives from the Consell General, the Government, the Comuns, and the Visura ciutadana), all while working jointly with the Secretariat of State for Equality and Citizen Participation.