Quality standards of civil society involvement in drug policies

This report is produced on behalf of the Civil Society Forum on Drugs (CSFD), an expert group of the European Commission, created in 2007 on the basis of the Commission Green Paper on the role of civil society in drugs policy in the EU. The CSFD membership comprises 45 civil society organisations (CSOs) from across Europe and representing a variety of fields of drug policy and stances within those fields.

One of the thematic working groups of the CSFD aims to assess and promote civil society involvement in the field of drug policy. In 2020, the working group conducted a literature review to assess existing guidelines and recommendations on how civil society can be involved in policy making in a meaningful way. Based on the findings of the review, this report presents quality standards of civil society involvement to guide both decision-makers and civil society on how to create mechanisms that facilitate the building of dialogue and partnership between them.

According to the European Monitoring Centre on Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), quality standards are generally accepted principles and a set of rules for the best/most appropriate implementation of interventions. They are used as benchmarks, based on professional consensus, to judge whether an activity is of high quality. An example is the European Drug Prevention Quality Standards (EDPQS), which aims to guide professionals on how to design, implement, monitor and evaluate interventions in drug prevention.