The COSIGHT Lab aims to promote greater resilience in Hamburg's society and beyond by enhancing societal competences to deal with future changes and challenges resulting from the multiple crises we all face. The network of non-profit organizations behind the COSIGHT Lab, referred to as "Cociety," has developed a dialogue concept called "CoSaturday." It aims to foster societal resilience by creating spaces for human encounters and facilitating targeted exchanges on contentious topics among diverse citizens with different backgrounds, opinions, incomes, ages, and education levels. A panel of 100 citizens, selected to represent Hamburg's society based on socio-demographic criteria, has been chosen for the 2-year test phase. The COSIGHT Lab aims to expand and deepen the concept by developing a method or approach to co-create solutions and future-oriented (positive) scenarios together with citizens, civil society, and policymakers. Through this, COSIGHT strives to identify success factors for resilience-promoting citizen participatory processes.
Key Features
Cociety is a network of currently 10 non-profit civil society organizations based in Hamburg and Berlin, Germany, aimed at strengthening social resilience. These organizations have joined together to form 'the initiatives for resilience,' based on the observation that German society, like many others, faces multiple current crises and future changes. These crises are interlinked, leading to increased complexity, acceleration, ambiguity, and uncertainty. Such conditions have various consequences for individual citizens and for German society as a whole, raising the risk of growing tendencies towards polarization, radicalization, and hostility towards democracy. For Cociety, resilience serves as a design principle through which society can effectively navigate the crises of our time while fostering social cohesion and democracy. The overarching goal of Cociety is to cultivate new forms of encounter and dialogue, particularly among diverse stakeholders such as citizens, civil society, and policymakers, concerning contradictory and conflictual societal issues.
Main Challenges
The COSIGHT Lab will focus on developing an approach that is scalable across various topics and challenges, beginning with food systems, with the overarching goal of fostering societal resilience through the enhancement of innovative participatory involvement projects in Europe. The lab will focus on the following challenges:
- Increasing societal conflict and problem-solving skills.
- Enhancing individual and societal responsibility, thereby promoting self-efficacy for realizing positive future scenarios.
- Mitigating societal polarization.
- Empowering citizens by giving them a voice in addressing current and future societal challenges and ensuring that this voice influences policy-making.
- Strengthening and developing resilience-promoting citizen processes.
Highlights
This lab places participatory processes at the forefront of designing strategies to bolster societal resilience. It builds upon the "CoSaturday" citizen dialogue format, expanding its scope from addressing recent social conflicts to incorporating a future-oriented perspective through Foresight methodologies. A key innovation lies in experimenting with providing incentives for citizen engagement in participative processes.
Furthermore, the lab aims to develop a scalable method or tool applicable to diverse topics and challenges (e.g., mobilization, climate, environment, social welfare) and suitable for geographical adaptation. The goal is to prototype and test a method/tool that can serve as a blueprint for participatory citizen involvement projects not only in Europe but also beyond, offering a framework for diverse actors to facilitate meaningful citizen engagement initiatives.