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Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions

Catching the Deliberative Wave

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Public authorities from all levels of government increasingly turn to Citizens' Assemblies, Juries, Panels and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems ranging from climate change to infrastructure investment decisions. They convene groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society for at least one full day – and often much longer – to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations that consider the complexities and compromises required for solving multifaceted public issues. This "deliberative wave" has been building since the 1980s, gaining momentum since around 2010. This report has gathered close to 300 representative deliberative practices to explore trends in such processes, identify different models, and analyse the trade-offs among different design choices as well as the benefits and limits of public deliberation. It includes Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes for Public Decision Making, based on comparative empirical evidence gathered by the OECD and in collaboration with leading practitioners from government, civil society, and academics. Finally, the report explores the reasons and routes for embedding deliberative activities into public institutions to give citizens a more permanent and meaningful role in shaping the policies affecting their lives.

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Models of representative deliberative processes

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.

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