Public Deliberation Consortium
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Communities of fate and the challenges of international public participation in transnational governance contexts
No full textA trans-national public consultation on climate change was held in 38 countries to provide citizen input to the 2009 UN Framework on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP15) meeting in Copenhagen. The uniform process involving 100 citizens in the participating countries focused on the key policy questions debated by participating countries. Based on the Canadian experience with this consultation and interviews with 13 other project managers primarily from developing countries, this paper explores several areas of tension: the tensions between the goals of uniformity and standardization versus recognition and accommodation of cultural complexities; the global versus local contexts; public ‘deficits’ versus capacities and capacity-building; the importance of tailoring for policy impacts versus exploring the values behind policy choices; and the complexities afforded by the issue itself. The paper concludes that these tensions are unavoidable in public consultations in transnational governance contexts involving global issues. These tensions need to be explicitly recognized and accommodated, while acknowledging the continuing importance of public consultation experiments in these transnational contexts
Synthesising the outputs of deliberation: Extracting meaningful results from a public forum
No full textRecent years have seen an increase in empirical studies of public deliberation. This has led to important advances in thinking through issues such as who to include, how best to inform lay audiences about a particular topic, and how to maximise the perceived legitimacy of deliberation. An important issue that has not received much attention is how to define, identify, and report the results of deliberation. The conversations among individuals that occur over the course of a deliberation can be understood as a large and complex set of qualitative data. The deliberative discourse that is produced over the course of a public deliberation contains a large number of statements by participating individuals, and it is not immediately obvious how certain statements might be extracted to characterise the official results of the deliberation. In particular, public deliberation aims to guide deliberants towards collective decisions – therefore, social scientific methods of analysis that do not orient to changes in individual deliberants’ positions at best only capture a part of what is going on. Further, qualitative analyses such as thematic or content analyses may give equal importance to considered and informed positions produced nearer to the end of a deliberative event and relatively uninformed and preliminary positions expressed at the beginning. While such analyses can provide important insights, they are therefore not sufficient on their own for identifying the results of deliberation. In this paper, I argue that the results of a deliberative forum are best conceptualised as constituted by at least three distinct factors: 1) the initial framing and structuring of the deliberation; 2) the facilitation process; and 3) the final (post-hoc) collation and analysis of materials by an analyst or host of the deliberation. I conclude that any meaningful and legitimate representation or synthesis of the results of deliberation should take into account the complexity of the discourse that is produced in such settings. The recent case of the BC BioLibrary Deliberation is used to illustrate and ground the discussion
What did we learn about citizen involvement in the health policy process: lessons from Brazil
No full textIn this paper I argue that citizen involvement helped to promote a more equitable distribution of public health services in Brazil. This achievement involved a balance of contributions from social actors and health system managers in forging policy innovations and institutional arrangements that linked bottom up innovation with national policy leveraging and decentralized implementation. The paper briefly describes this cycle and its relation with the implementation of a national network of forums for citizen involvement in health policy, inquiring in more detail the conditions that favor the association between these forums and the policy making process. Our results do not corroborate the idea that deliberative arenas should be insulated from political passions; rather, they suggest that participation of mobilized social actors contributes to the effectiveness of these forums. This contribution happens both due to the knowledge that these actors bring about problems in the area and to their insertion in networks that connect forums to a wide set of social organizations and political, governmental, and health institutions, which in turn facilitate the dissemination and negotiation of the proposals and demands formulated by the forums. However, our results also suggest that the inclusion of these actors increases confrontation to the detriment of deliberation, which brings us to the discussion of the role that could be played by mediators who are well-equipped to construct deliberative processes
Deliberate Silences
No full textThis article offers silences to make deliberative democracy more inclusive and diverse. Considering deliberation broadly as conversation, I advance the argument that silence may be the missing link in our democratic theories: that some silences are packed full of meaning, others can be used as temporary tactics for bringing more meaningful voices to the table, and that silent yielding is the most crucial practice for a robust democratic world. Inclusion involves at least two important dimensions. First, excluded subjects must be brought, allowed, welcomed, and embraced to democratic conversations. Excluded voices must become present. Second, and this is the more difficult dimension, exclusionary identities must be transformed in the process. Simply including more voices and meanings does little if there are structural forces that preclude the rearrangement of democratic possibilities. One such structural force is privileged identities that, by their character, are unlikely to hear and be transformed. In this regard, I put forth silent yielding as an enduring democratic habit that, if practiced sincerely, is likely to transform such identities, and transition thin democracies (ones in which citizens participate in order to simply fight for their own self-interests) into strong democracies (ones in which all citizens are welcomed to the table, and all leave the table transformed in the direction of the common). Deliberate silences combine intentionality, meaningfulness, thoughtful engagement, and robust commitment to inclusion, in order to make deliberative democracy more democratic and transformative
The People’s Lobby: A Model for Online Activist Deliberation
No full textThis article presents a model for a “People’s Lobby,” a digital process of deliberation and activism that allows citizens to have their voices heard on important political issues. The model described in this proposal attempts to achieve deliberation for its own sake, but also for the sake of an activist intervention geared toward immediate response—a process commonly called lobbying. In other words, this is a model that combines the fairness and inclusivity of deliberation with the prodding tension of organized activist lobbying. The People’s Lobby might not completely counteract the effects of more conventional corporate lobbying and other mass-organizational pressures, but if it increases the impact of citizens’ reflective and deliberative voices even marginally, it will be well worth the effort
Local Art, Local Action: A Proposal for Deliberating on and about Main Street
No full textIn every campaign, politicians make promises. They spell out their hopes and dreams for their constituents and describe the dystopia that would exist should their opponent be elected instead. With campaign speeches characterized by lofty promises, buzz words, and vague generalities, deliberative opportunities exist for clarification and complexification of candidate (and party) platforms. I propose a unique possibility for local politics that would demystify the electoral process and increase civic engagement by providing community-level opportunities to participate in platform-formation, information-seeking, and deliberation. Specifically, I propose that local government host an issue-raising arts festival, which would lead to an online deliberative forum
Institutionalizing Deliberative Democracy: the ‘Tuscany laboratory’
No full textAlthough deliberative theory has attracted increasing attention from many quarters, a relevant question that has not yet received adequate consideration is whether it should be institutionalized (Fung et al. 2005), and how that might be done. Although there have been many successful ‘one shot’ experiences of deliberative participation, there are few examples of institutionalization as a routine practice. This raises several issues including the relationship of deliberative processes with representative institutions and processes. Compared with other developed nations, Italy has not traditionally been a leader in the application of public participation practices. However, several regional administrations have ventured into this field in recent years. At the end of 2007 the Region of Tuscany passed Law no. 69 defining Rules on the Promotion of Participation in the Formulation of Regional and Local Policies, an innovative legal provision explicitly aimed at pro-actively promoting citizen engagement in local and regional decision making. This law, by incorporating features explicitly derived from deliberative theory, institutionalizes citizen participation; that is, the involvement through group dialogue of citizens and stakeholders in decision-making about issues or problems of public interest. Tuscany has become a remarkable ‘laboratory’ for empirically testing the validity of deliberative participation in the real world, for verifying the effects and possible benefits of its institutionalization, and for applying a specific model which enables representative government and mini-publics to co-exist (and to become complementary and mutually reinforcing). The results from this laboratory will be of relevance to scholars, practitioners and politicians who are interested in such democratic innovations. Law no. 69/07 might well inform the uptake of citizen engagement well beyond Tuscan borders, both in Italy and internationally. An analysis of the approach adopted by the Law offers an opportunity to reflect on how authorities might go about actively promoting and institutionalizing citizen participation. This paper examines the impetus for the Law and the participatory process through which the Law itself was designed; it illustrates the goals of the Law and how these have been operationalized into legal provisions, with specific attention to the role of the administrations (including an ad hoc independent Authority) who were entrusted with the implementation of the Law; it highlights the deliberative features of the Law; and finally it offers a preliminary discussion of the outcomes of the Law – both successful and less so – during its first three years of existence
Stakeholder and Citizen Roles in Public Deliberation
No full textThis paper explores theoretical and practical distinctions between individual citizens (‘citizens’) and organized groups (\u27stakeholder representatives\u27 or ‘stakeholders’ for short) in public participation processes convened by government as part of policy development. Distinctions between ‘citizen’ and ‘stakeholder’ involvement are commonplace in government discourse and practice; public involvement practitioners also sometimes rely on this distinction in designing processes and recruiting for them. Recognizing the complexity of the distinction, we examine both normative and practical reasons why practitioners may lean toward—or away from—recruiting citizens, stakeholders, or both to take part in deliberations, and how citizen and stakeholder roles can be separated or combined within a process. The article draws on a 2012 Canadian-Australian workshop of deliberation researchers and practitioners to identify key challenges and understandings associated with the categories of stakeholder and citizen and their application, and hopes to continue this conversation with the researcher-practitioner community
The Politics of Subnational Decentralization in France, Brazil, and Italy
No full textDecentralized political institutions increasingly play a substantial role in the lives of people, implementing services deriving from influential (elected) bodies of governance, and influencing the relative degree of civil society access to policy-making. The following paper challenges pluralist and social capitalist claims of how decentralized institutions arise and differ in their ability to function. Robert Putnam, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaela Nanetti’s (1993) book Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy will provide the base from which this paper departs, utilizing comparative historical analysis to argue instead that subnational or otherwise regional and local governments entail dialectical relations within and between different levels of state institutions. Overall, this paper argues that the struggles over decentralization ultimately depend on ideological opponents and the balance of power in the struggle for political change, simultaneously affecting both political institutions and civil society participation. This paper briefly unfolds Putnam et al.’s arguments regarding the relationship between democratic institutions and civil society, followed by two case studies – France and Brazil – explaining several macrofactors influencing the processes, outcomes, and implications of decentralization. Thirdly, decentralization and multi-level governance is tied to civil society participation. Lastly, decentralization in relation to partisan objectives is discussed with reference to participatory budgeting
Framing Democracy and Conflict Through Storytelling in Deliberative Groups
No full textDisagreement is a fundamental part of deliberative discussion, but how group members understand their disagreement can profoundly influence their actions. These conflict frames have implications for members’ perception of both the issue and as their relationships. Drawing on Putnam’s (1990, Brummans et al., 2008) work on conflict frames, this study examines how members of an online deliberative group framed and reframed their conflicts through personal storytelling. Members drew on different models of democracy in their stories. Some managed their disagreements through reframing their conflicts and relationships as collaborative, even in response to adversarially-framed stories. This study advances research in conflict, group discussion, and deliberative discussion and offers practical suggestions for facilitators on how to recognize, interrogate, and help groups develop productive conflict frames