Making the Case for Deliberative Democracy: Reflections from Democracy R&D
By Jesi Carson, Participedia
This year’s Democracy R&D (DRD) Conference took place within the unceded, ancestral territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations, also known as Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, a place I am grateful to call home. Hosted by Mass LBP, a Canadian organization dedicated to advancing the practice of Citizens’ Assemblies, the conference brought together practitioners and scholars from around the world for nearly a week of professional development workshops, knowledge exchange and collaboration. Representing Participedia, I had a worthwhile experience engaging with and learning from this vibrant, dedicated community of practice. I learned a lot about citizens’ assemblies and why they hold promise, and I’m left feeling inspired to explore new ways for Participedia to help “make the case” for more deliberative practices around the world.
This post offers three reflections from my perspective as a core team member of Participedia, and as a public engagement practitioner: First, I observed notable curiosity about the emphasis on Indigenous territorial acknowledgment and history that the conference foregrounded, particularly from practitioners outside of Canada. I found that engaging in conversations about the importance of these practices illuminates just how needed they truly are. Second, thinking about democracy as an ongoing practice requiring various skills or “muscles” is the core message of Democracy Fitness, a wonderful training that I took part in as part of DRD. Disagreement is one of these core competencies that we face daily with polarizing politics, and learning to “agree to disagree” can be highly productive. Finally, the need for “proof of concept” came up quite a bit at DRD. While it’s clear that DRD practitioners believe in the impact potential of their work, there is a significant data gap in evaluation of deliberative democratic processes like Citizens’ Assemblies.
But first… What is deliberative democracy anyway?
Before I unpack my conference reflections in more depth, I’ll offer a little background for those less versed in the “deliberative way” (or “deliberative wave” as the community refers to the mainstreaming of these practices globally since the early 2000’s). Deliberation is a distinct approach within the broadly defined “democratic innovations” ecosystem that Participedia explores through its crowdsourcing platform and global research partnerships. Deliberation typically employs dialogic, participatory methods for collaboratively forming consensus, often toward policy recommendations. A common distinguishing characteristic of deliberative democracy is the use of intentionally representative and methodical participant selection processes. Participants are typically chosen through sortition or civic lottery, often with a weighting system to ensure equity. Citizens’ assemblies are a widely practiced deliberative method, and are the focus of several Participedia research initiatives. For example, this collection of Transnational Citizens’ Assemblies was compiled by Participedia’s Democracy Across Borders research cluster.
Early on in the conference, during a masterclass in facilitating deliberation hosted by MosaicLab, I was struck by their willingness to onboard practitioners to their methods and strategies. In fact, their secret sauce is dished out in detail in Facilitating Deliberation — A Practical Guide. The deliberation field doesn’t appear to be dominated by any one team of practitioners, and everyone I encountered generously shared knowledge and strategy. The DRD community clearly holds a deep belief that deliberative approaches to public engagement have the potential to influence policy change in ways that genuinely benefit the communities those policies are meant to serve. This shared belief is supported by the DRD community of practice through conferences like this one, at the same time acknowledging that practice is a process, and we all still have a lot of learning and unlearning to do.
Re-rooting democracy in Indigenous history and connections to the land
DRD opened with a Welcome to Territory by Elder Shane Pointe, and the conference’s keynote speaker was Niigaan Sinclair, University of Manitoba, presenting Indigenous Perspectives on Collaborative Governance and Deliberation. The launch of the Victoria-Saanich Citizens’ Assembly on Municipal Amalgamation, which DRD participants were invited to attend, also prioritized Indigenous history as a way to lay the groundwork for deliberation. In my view, this is good practice, setting a baseline of understanding of Indigenous rights and wisdom, and reminding all involved that connection to land is critical to our survival. I sometimes forget that this isn’t as common as it should be. While BC is the first province in so-called Canada to pass the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into law, we continue to accept forced removal of Indigenous children from their communities through racist policies like birth alerts. I shouldn’t be surprised when folks from other parts of the world are inquisitive about the need for Indigenous knowledge and history to be brought into deliberative spaces.
In his keynote remarks, Niigaan Sinclar reminded us that Indigenous democratic practices are as old as time, predating modern democracy by thousands of years. He explained that confederacy was learned from Indigenous culture, and that nomadic, border-shifting ways of life necessarily required deliberative practices, with elder grandmothers serving as decision makers, positions earned through years of experience in matriarchal societies. He shared examples of Indigenous activism, youth and elders alike putting their bodies on the line to protect the land, the water, the air, and the ecosystem of life that sustains us all from un-checked resource extraction. This very month we honour a National Day of Truth and Reconciliation, acknowledging the systemic violence and erasure of Indigenous peoples and their ways of being on these lands.
Indigenous histories can be uncomfortable, particularly from a settler colonial standpoint, which the current world order suits just fine. So why take up conference time and space with these histories, knowing that they are bound to make people uncomfortable? Because we cannot move forward together otherwise. Change that is built on systems and structures of oppression will continue to perpetuate these violences. Moreover, there is room to grow in this discomfort. It is activating. The conversations I had during DRD challenged me to tap into the knowledge that I am gaining, as a settler, from Indigenous wisdom and scholarship, and through cultivating my own personal relationship with the land. Through learning native species and teaching my daughter the principles of the honourable harvest. Through artistic practices, deep listening, and, as Elder Shane Pointe implored us all, through opening my heart. As with deliberation, a democracy that supports all life will sometimes require us to lean into discomfort.
Agreeing to disagree, and other indicators of democracy fitness
The disagreement muscle is not uncommonly flexed these days, as we face polarizing politics around the world. Before DRD, I had never considered that disagreeing on purpose could be an effective exercise to find pathways to empathy and understanding, and in some cases even consensus. The first example of disagreement as a useful tool that stood out for me during DRD was part of the Lightning Round Assembly Showcase, featuring 22 rapid-fire presentations on recent and upcoming citizens’ assemblies. In describing the process design of a Catalan Climate Assembly undertaken by Deliberativa to explore possibilities for climate mitigation within their agri-food system, Yago Bermejo, outlined an unconventional approach to agenda setting. Knowing that significant polarization exists around these issues, Yago and his team invited stakeholders to deliberatively agree on the specific ways that they disagreed! Finding this common ground changed the dynamic and opened up opportunities for dialogue and consensus that might not have otherwise existed.
The Democracy Fitness training at DRD reinforced this insight, introducing disagreement as the first of ten key democracy muscles that require exercise to maintain. In other words, “use it or lose it.” With this principle in mind, the two day training introduced participants to several fun, fast exercises to strengthen the democracy muscles. The trainers continually invited participants to reflect on how these tools could be brought into our daily lives, with examples ranging from exercising at the family dinner table to serving as icebreakers at work retreats. I can see applicability within our Participedia School curriculum design, as expanding understandings of what democracy is and can be is an important learning outcome of our School programs. But also in coalition building more generally, practicing these exercises in active listening, curiosity, empathy, opinion and all the other muscle groups can create more respectful, open and dynamic collaborative spaces.
Making the case for participatory and deliberative practices with impact data
My final reflection is about evaluation, the focus of at least one workshop and countless conversations during the DRD conference. What kinds of impact data are needed to grow and support diverse cultures of participation and deliberation around the world? What proof of concept is required to make the case, for example to government officials, that CA’s and other kinds of deliberative practices are worth the investment? These questions are being explored by several organizations in the DRD network.
Marjan Esassi and the FIDE North America team are pioneering a standardized evaluation process for citizens’ assemblies. Their process will include surveys, research observations and interviews conducted by a research coordinator in collaboration with CA implementers. Aviv Ovadya, AI & Democracy Foundation, is developing taxonomies for understanding the interoperability of various deliberative methods in order to quickly infer when and why they might work best together. Both the People Powered Participation Playbook and DRD’s newly launched New Frontiers Project’s “living guidebooks” are examples of best practice resources intended to support wider spread adoption of deliberative practices. KNOCA is actively working on evaluation frameworks for climate assemblies. The list goes on.
During phase one of the Participedia project (2015–2020) researchers developed a set of participant and observer surveys intended to standardize evaluation of democratic innovations and support our existing dataset. The surveys were tested and refined over time, resulting in an exhaustive list of key performance indicators that would seem daunting to any evaluator, not to mention a survey respondent. This experience taught us that creating “one survey to rule them all” is not the best approach, but that doesn’t mean we should discard the work done. Connecting with folks at DRD expressing a clear need to generate data that proves that deliberative processes result in real impact has set the wheels in motion to revive and refresh Participedia’s surveys, this time in a more adaptable, accessible format.
Participedia is also experimenting with data analysis, having invited two cohorts of masters level computer science students at Northeastern University Vancouver to prototype with our dataset. We are in the process of building an interactive data visualization dashboard intended to help us tell stories about the current state of democratic practices around the world. Supported by Participedia and other partners, i4Policy has launched the Governance Vocabularies Initiative (GVI), which reminds us that no one dataset is going to have all the answers. The GVI’s prototype search interface currently draws in Participedia and LATINNO datasets, but this is just the beginning. National Civic League has data on over ten thousand democracy organizations in the United States. Datasets on citizens assemblies are rapidly emerging in the DRD community. We are slowly becoming data rich, and the time is right to begin sensemaking and cross referencing these various knowledge sources.
Parting thoughts
In writing these reflections, it occurs to me that every DRD participant could probably come up with three completely different key insights. This is a testament to the breadth of knowledge and experience shared during the conference, even with its focus on citizens’ assemblies. It was refreshing to zoom in on one method for a while, and in doing so I can see the insights ripple out into the wider space of democratic innovations. Overall, I am very grateful to have attended this gathering, to experience first hand the innovative energy of the citizens’ assembly field, and to see many potential synergies with the Participedia community.
Deliberative practices hold great promise, not just in government spaces but in schools, communities, and even homes. If we can practice these potentials in our everyday life, who knows what may come? As Patti Pon of Calgary Arts Development eloquently expressed during a DRD panel on The Deliberative Wave in North America, waves come and go, and they will often leave treasures, rocks and shells on the shore. I can’t wait to find out what treasures the future waves of democratic innovations will hold for us, and I look forward to exploring these ideas in collaboration with the DRD community.
