Speakers: Álvaro Garrido, Ana Costa, Margarida Queirós, José Reis e João Rodrigues | Moderator: Ana Drago

Framework

The profound transformations experienced by Portuguese society over the last two decades pose today a set of relevant challenges to public decision, whether in the field of the economy and institutional insertion in the European context, or in terms of the provision of welfare or the new challenges in the face of environmental and health risks. In truth, the multiple and differentiated impacts of the pandemic on the Portuguese society in the last year and a half seem to have made more perceptible the imbrication between new and old vulnerabilities, which must be faced and responded to.

In this sense, it becomes clear today the need to resume the discussion and reflection around the production processes of structuring and democratically sustained political choices, capable of designing a strategic development horizon in the face of these multiple challenges. To face them, planning issues gain a new urgency and centrality in democratic societies.

Thus, a group of researchers intend to convoke the Portuguese society to a debate on public and democratic planning, as a participatory process of empowerment of the public decision. We intend to discuss, understand and assume the essential dimensions of such subject: what planning means, which are the relevant actors, the scales involved, the nature of the process, the problems of each time, the results to be achieved, the costs of the absence of planning, the relationship between the great deliberations and their execution, the relationship with private dynamics and with public policies, the way to deal with the great urgencies resulting from climate change and environmental unsustainability and, now, the real knowledge of the meaning of pandemics.

We are now launching a series of thematic seminars «Public and Democratic Planning Initiative» - which aim to build a sustained reflection on planning issues - culminating in a Conference on Public and Democratic Planning that will bring together all those interested in this topic and its usefulness.

The inaugural seminar will take place in Coimbra on 27 October 2021, with the theme: What is planning today, in the face of globalisation and systemic risks? Scale and structural changes.

Knowing that the planning process is about understanding the capacity for action at national level, how does this relate to the supranational and sub-national scales? How are the major problems highlighted by the pandemic and the changes that will necessarily take place in “globalisation” to be dealt with?  What is expected to happen in deliberation and in political cycles and how will these accommodate the medium and long-term logics and democratic participation inherent to planning?
 

Other Information

Note: Esta atividade por ser de acesso aberto não confere declaração de participação, uma vez que tal documento apenas será facultado em eventos que prevejam registo prévio e acesso controlado.

Session in face-to-face format at the Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra and remotely (streaming).

Face-to-face format: free entrance, no registration required, subject to room capacity. Mandatory use of mask during the session.

Access the streaming session on FEUC's youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/FEUC1972

Note: As this activity is open access, it does not grant a participation statement, since such document will only be provided in events that foresee previous registration and controlled access.

 
Support: Faculty of Economics of the University of Coimbra