Ensuring Legitimacy in Stakeholder Engagement: The ‘5 Es’ Framework
The DSA foresees that external stakeholders – such as independent experts, civil society groups, and industry representatives – engage in its rollout and enforcement. To help ensure these processes' legitimacy, we have developed the “5 E’s Framework” encompassing the guiding principles: Equity, Expertise, Effectiveness, Empowering, and Expanding Competencies.
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AlgorithmWatch has designed this framework to assist anyone with responsibility for designing and implementing processes for stakeholder engagement, to ensure the legitimacy of outcomes from these engagements - given these outcomes can affect people’s lives and rights. It can also provide specific principles and language for external parties to refer to when providing input, opinions, and critiques of stakeholder engagement.
These principles are designed to evaluate who is involved in stakeholder engagement and how it is conducted, rather than the outcomes (outcomes should be evaluated according to relevant substantive criteria e.g. whether certain legal requirements were met).
We provide examples specifically relating to risk assessments under DSA Article 34 in order to provide focus and clarity. However the framework could be extended to apply to other contexts.
A fuller explanation of the framework and the principles, how they were developed, and how they connect to key values and expectations of democratic societies, can be found in an accompanying paper.
