Technical report on the design, organisation and evaluation of the Citizens' Forums on Green Hydrogen and Its Alternatives in Gabès

Unofficial AI-generated summary based on the public title and abstract. Not an official translation.

🔬研究者:Provides a practical template for designing and evaluating citizens' assemblies on hydrogen, with adjustments for restrictive civic space.

🏢実務担当者:Offers a tested methodology for stakeholder engagement in hydrogen projects, including visual tools and preparatory consultations.

🏛政策担当者:Demonstrates how citizen input can shape hydrogen policy priorities (e.g., health, equity), suggesting a pathway for participatory policymaking.

This report presents the implementation of citizens’ forums on green hydrogen (H2V) and its alternatives, conducted by Al Bawsala in partnership with the (En)Visioning Justice project (UCL), using and testing the Citizens’ Assembly Toolkit developed by UCL as a methodological framework for the design and implementation of the process. The project forms part of Al Bawsala’s broader work on energy transition governance in Tunisia, including strategic decisions related to green hydrogen since 2023, and reflects the organization’s sustained commitment to transparency and environmental and social justice, as well as its practice of embedding citizen participation within its work through systematic, recurring, and active civic engagement, in a sector that has so far been largely dominated by technocratic decision-making. Gabès was chosen as a case study due to its historical exposure to industrial pollution, environmental vulnerability, and its strategic significance within Tunisia’s national green hydrogen plan. The project took place amid sustained patterns of civic contestation in southern Tunisia, where mobilizations around environmental harm, socio-economic marginalization, and public accountability have progressively reshaped public expectations regarding participation and social justice. Since September 2025, citizen mobilizations in the region—including demands for the dismantling of polluting units of the Tunisian Chemical Group—have strongly influenced the local context. This context was further shaped by an institutionalized public narrative framing civil society involvement in the mobilizations in Gabès as illegitimate or externally motivated, underscoring both the depth of social and environmental grievances and the tightening constraints on civic engagement. The implementation of the forums also served as a practical test of UCL’s Citizens’ Assembly Toolkit, allowing methodological adjustments to ensure inclusivity, safety, and relevance to the Tunisian context. Visual tools, including caricatures produced by a collaborating artist, complemented written documentation by capturing recurring ideas, tensions, and citizen reflections in a way that enriched both analysis and collective understanding. These movements, coupled with heightened political and social dynamism, and a shrinking civic space, necessitated relocating the forums from Gabès to Tunis in order to ensure participant safety and preserve a neutral environment for deliberation. Despite this adjustment, the project retained its territorial relevance by recruiting participants primarily from Gabès and by integrating insights drawn from preparatory consultations, focus groups, questionnaires, and guidance from the advisory board. The forums were designed according to principles inspired by citizens’ assemblies, emphasizing neutrality, representativeness, shared learning, collective deliberation, and transparency. Within this structured framework, participants engaged comprehensively with technical, environmental, social, and governance dimensions of green hydrogen, exploring potential opportunities, risks, and local impacts. Participants critically assessed both technical information and local realities, drawing on lived experience to shape recommendations grounded in environmental justice principles, including the right to a healthy environment, access to information, territorial equity, meaningful participation, and accountability of both public and private actors. Deliberations led to the formulation of three citizen-driven recommendations: a regional health impact assessment, a social and solidarity economy initiatives and fiscal measures and finally an awareness campaign combined with a territorial mapping of environmental, water, and health-related risks—with the latter being prioritized through collective voting. In addition to this priority, other recurring concerns—such as water governance, the promotion of social and solidarity economy initiatives, corporate social responsibility, and long-term health impacts—provided further insights into citizen priorities and local perspectives. Overall, the initiative demonstrates that citizens’ assemblies can be successfully adapted to restrictive civic contexts as this process highlights the importance of preparatory consultations, integration of visual and interactive tools, methodological flexibility, and structured deliberation to enhance citizen agency and informed decision-making. These reflections also feed into Al Bawsala’s ongoing work on green hydrogen, providing actionable citizen perspectives that can inform advocacy, policy dialogue, and locally relevant follow-up initiatives.

• semanticscholar https://doi.org/10.14324/000.rp.10222368first seen 2026-05-15 19:35:10 · last seen 2026-06-16 05:08:55