The increasing complexity of policy making and the failure to find solutions to some of the most pressing policy problems have prompted politicians, policy makers, civil society organisations, and citizens to reflect on how collective public decisions should be taken in the twenty-first century. There is a need for new ways to find common ground and take action. This is particularly true for issues that are values-based, require trade-offs, and demand long-term solutions. The OECD has collected evidence and data that support the idea that citizen participation in public decision making can deliver better policies, strengthen democracy, and build trust. This report focuses on representative deliberative processes in particular, as part of a wider effort by democratic institutions to become more participatory and open to informed citizen input and collective intelligence.

This brief guide is intended to help readers understand key terms, concepts, and the research methodology used to produce this first OECD report on deliberative processes and institutions. A detailed methodology description is presented in .

The deliberative wave has been building as innovative ways of involving citizens in the policy-making cycle have gained traction with governments and citizens across the globe. This report is the first empirical, comparative study to consider the workings of representative deliberative processes for public decision making and discuss the case for their institutionalisation.

This chapter sets the context for the report in light of current economic, cultural, political, technological, and environmental trends. It links the findings to the OECD’s ongoing work on open government, explains the rationale for the focus on representative deliberative processes, why such processes can be effective for policy making, as well as when and when not to use them.

Numerous models of representative deliberative processes have been developed, tested, and implemented across the world. They can be clustered into four types of purpose: (1) informed citizen recommendations on policy questions; (2) citizen opinion on policy questions; (3) informed citizen evaluation of ballot measures, and (4) permanent representative deliberative models. This chapter’s first section introduces 12 models of representative deliberative processes, broken down by the types of purpose. The models described are: Citizens' Assembly; Citizens' Jury/Panel; Consensus Conference; Planning Cell; G1000; Citizens' Council; Citizens' Dialogue; Deliberative Poll/Survey; World Wide Views; Citizens' Initiative Review; the Ostbelgien Model; and the City Observatory. The second part of this chapter outlines how to choose between different models depending on the purpose, complexity, issue and other factors. The chapter concludes with a discussion of combining features of different models.

This chapter highlights key trends in the use of representative deliberative processes for public decision making from 1986 to October 2019 across OECD Member countries.It presents an overview of two waves of interest in the use of representative deliberative processes over time, their use at different levels of government, the popularity of different deliberative models, types of policy issues that have been addressed using these processes, average cost, and types of organisations that were commissioned to implement them.

This chapter relies on the evidence gathered for this report and the wider academic literature to assess the elements that contribute to what could be considered a ‘successful’ representative deliberative process. The framework for analysis has four principles of evaluation:1) design integrity: the procedural criteria which ensure that a process is perceived as fair by the public and in line with principles of good practice;2) sound deliberation: the elements that enable quality deliberation that results in public judgement; 3) influential recommendations and actions: the evidence of impact on public decision making, and4) impact on the wider public: the secondary and long-term effects on efficacy and public attitudes.Through this analysis, this chapter considers the key benefits and challenges of deliberative processes for public decision making.

Based on analysis of the data collected and in collaboration with an advisory group of leading practitioners from government, civil society, and academia, the OECD has identified common principles and good practices that may be of useful guidance to policy makers seeking to develop and implement representative deliberative processes. This chapter explains the methodology and sets out the good practice principles.

The evidence suggests that the majority of representative deliberative processes that have taken place have been one-off initiatives, dependent on political will. Their topics have been decided top-down by public decision makers. However, there has been a move towards experimenting with the design of new democratic institutions, which embed deliberative processes in such a way as to make them a permanent part of the policy cycle, or a requirement under certain circumstances. Some of these new institutions also give citizens an agenda-setting role, allowing them to decide which issues should be up for public deliberation and how the remit should be framed. This chapter explores the reasons for and routes to institutionalising public deliberation, as well as its limits.

This chapter describes other deliberative practices that did not meet all three criteria for inclusion in this report: impact (commissioned by a public authority); representativeness (participants were randomly selected and demographically stratified); and deliberation (they had at least one full day of face-to-face meetings). The examples in this chapter are nonetheless valuable and relevant for the OECD’s broader work on citizen participation.The first part of the chapter looks at the other types of deliberative trends across the world: Deliberative Polls in Africa; deliberative practices in Latin America and India; as well as international and transnational deliberative processes.The second part of the chapter discusses other creative ways that deliberative processes have been used in responding to social mobilisation, designing new models of democracy, drafting constitutions, as well as in democracy festivals and 21st Century Town meetings.

This chapter includes an overview of the report and its key findings, acknowledges the limitations of the data, and provides key recommendations to public decision makers for improving how deliberative processes are initiated, designed, run, communicated, monitored, evaluated, and institutionalised. It presents reflections on further areas of study.

There are a great number of existing principles and standards for citizen participation generally. ‎5, however, focuses on principles and standards for deliberative processes for public decision making in particular. The following list of principles or standards for deliberative engagement existed when the collaborative work for developing the OECD principles began in September 2019:

To be included to form the basis of an empirical comparative analysis in this report, the representative deliberative processes needed to meet the three defining characteristics identified through the OECD’s analysis:

Throughout this report, there are references to various useful resources for practitioners in government and civil society. A version of this list will be maintained up-to-date on the following Trello board: https://trello.com/b/FypHueG9/resources-for-representative-deliberative-processes.