Is deliberation universal? Should it be? Is our way of conceptualizing and organizing it in Europe (too) “Western-centric”? Are we ready, together, to acknowledge the answers to these questions? In any case, they deserve to be discussed and debated. Two researchers and experts in “democratic innovations”, Nicole Curato and Melisa Ross(1), bring some perspective to our practices.
Missions Publiques. Your work focuses on deliberation around the world. Do you believe that deliberation is universal? Or is it context-specific? Is it an export product that came from the West like democracy? How?
Melisa Ross. The answer to this question depends on how we conceptualize deliberation: if we understand it in academic terms, we’re speaking about a conversation that takes place under strictly ‘controlled’ conditions, where a selected group of participants can weigh in and consider each other’s opinions toward a common goal: reaching consensus through public reasoning.
But this definition presupposes a number of elements such as equal access to the public sphere, normative ways of thinking about argumentation and speech structures, and ignores to a large extent the very real material inequalities that can prevent people from engaging in such spaces.
If we understand deliberation, instead, as a democratic form conversation, we are rather thinking of a human capacity that existed well before those scholarly definitions took shape and will continue to exist after as well.
So maybe the question is not whether deliberation is universal, because it is part of a human shared experience and takes place in many different forms and contexts. Maybe we should rather ask why we haven’t paid so much attention to the ways that ‘actually existing’ deliberation is effectively happening across the world.
Nicole Curato. I agree with Melisa that deliberation – broadly conceived – is taking place in various places outside the West. The book Deliberative Democracy in Asia, for example, provided numerous historically grounded examples on how inclusive consultation as a mechanism for collective decision-making has long been a practice in Asian societies, even before elections were introduced. Deliberation may have different ‘look and feel’ in various places, and our task as scholars and advocates of deliberative democracy is to celebrate the plurality of expressions of deliberation, instead of imposing a single ‘gold standard’ of what good deliberation means.
Missions Publiques. If we continue your line of thought, when “we” speak of deliberation as in the academic space and in the Global North, we’re thinking about formalized and institutional deliberation…
Melisa Ross. Yes, and it entails at least two features: first, that participants have equal access to information and to a conversational space, and second, that they in some way represent the larger societal body.
And yet, when we examine existing public resources for those interested in implementing deliberative processes, the list of requirements quickly grows into much longer lists: for example, the OECD identifies at least eleven principles for deliberative processes.
So instead of thinking about deliberation as an actual existing form of democratic organization and exchange in communities, the scope of processes we think about quickly narrows down when we take those two elements as the core of deliberation. We are now thinking about very specific forms of conversation that can take place under very restrictive conditions that are extremely hard to achieve in contexts beyond resource-rich countries and societies.
In practice, this has translated into an expansive focus on formal and material conditions to create that conversational space, such as ensuring independent expertise and professional facilitation, choosing accessible buildings or platforms for those conversations to take place, and most recently, as we have seen in the Global Assembly(2), also integrating solutions such as simultaneous translation for participants.
What we are witnessing is the growing consolidation of the ‘civic lottery’, or sortition, into a guarantee of representation and legitimacy in deliberation. This can lead to two main problems: first, ignoring vibrant forms of participation and deliberation beyond the global North because they do not fit those principles, and second, attempting to root formal and institutionalized deliberation that does reflect those principles in contexts where they might make little sense, ignore existing forms of community governance, or even erase the agency of those working in the territories and on the ground.
Nicole Curato. Again, I completely agree with Melisa. I am deeply concerned that some people equate ‘deliberative democracy’ with civic lottery or deliberative mini-publics. This is a shame because a big part of our task as advocates of deliberative democracy is to think about ways of transforming our public sphere, and how our public sphere can be more responsive to good reasons, how our public sphere can listen out for minoritized voices. Part of our task is to think about regulation or accountability with big tech companies who shape public conversations today which mostly take place online, or to think about the political economy of global media that promote commercial interests over the public good. I do know many advocates of deliberative democracy working in this area, and I hope these voices can be amplified as well.
« It’s fascinating to see how much communities are doing across the world, so why are we still so focused on so few cases in Europe and other Western countries? Especially when the lessons we can learn from them are of limited application beyond the global North.
Melisa
Missions Publiques. Do you think there is a European/Western way of speaking about citizen participation and deliberation? How?
Melisa Ross. Willingly or unwillingly, the global North sets the standards for where the world is headed. If we take the OECD report on the principles for deliberative democracy, it was developed upon their examination of over 570 deliberative processes that took place in Global North countries. The report concludes that that deliberation is taking more and more space as an option to influence policy globally.
But other databases give us other information. For instance, the LATINNO database registered 3,700 cases of participation only in Latin America, in the period between 1990 and 2020. Among them, deliberation has been the primary mean of innovation in at least 43% of all those cases. As far as we know, there is more deliberation going on in Latin America than anywhere else in the world. And yet, another 28% of those thousands of cases relied on citizen participation, 24% on digital participation, and 5% on direct voting. So what about those other options to influence policy?
And yet, those are not the processes that we are studying, and those are not the experiences that we are learning from. Participedia, which is an open and collaborative database where everyone can send in contributions, has registered some 2,000 different cases of participation and deliberation around the world, taking place through over 350 different methods and involving more than 800 organizations. It’s fascinating to see how much communities are doing across the world, so why are we still so focused on so few cases in Europe and other Western countries? Especially when the lessons we can learn from them are of limited application beyond the global North.
This is not to say that those processes across the world are flawless or ‘exemplary’. They often might not achieve their ends, they might get coopted by forces other than those of citizens, or their resolutions might be completely ignored by governments and other powerful agencies. But that is the messy reality of governance, of actual communities figuring out their needs and how to solve them, and it makes sense to understand how citizens enact change outside of neat rooms, facilitated conversations, and streamlined flows.
Nicole Curato. Yes, there is, and it is very boring! When I learned about deliberative democracy for the first time, gentlemanly statesman-like speech was considered the exemplar. Some pointed to Supreme Court deliberations as the ideal form of deliberation, while others pointed to parliamentary debates as a site of deliberation. I thought, my goodness, this is very, very dull!
Deliberative theory, of course, has moved on from holding up these spaces as the ideal spaces of deliberation, especially after the feminist critique that these spaces are mostly composed of educated elite men. So in the past decades, deliberative theory considered more ‘everyday’ sites of speech like social media, the family, kitchen tables, and other ‘domestic’ sites of conversation associated to women as vibrant sites of deliberation.
I also hope there is more recognition of how deliberation takes place outside the parameters of ‘gentlemanly speech.’ In my home country, the Philippines, the richest and most vibrant political conversations I have observed are not taking place in the formal halls of congress but in shopfronts where working class people, housewives, and precarious workers hang out to have a drink or share a snack, and engage in loud, lighthearted, candid, sometimes vulgar, but sharp exchanges of observations about social problems and what can be done to change society. These are informal sites of deliberation are critical to a public sphere where elites dominate sites of power.
Missions Publiques. How can imposing a model or standardizing processes be detrimental?
Melisa Ross. There are many ways to enact change and especially in communities and in contexts that don’t have the resources of the Global North. It’s easy to enumerate long lists of standards that can only be achieved with large budgets that most organizations, governments and communities don’t have. Instead, what seems to be working in the Global South is to “work with what we have” and continue engaging communities in the ways that they have been engaging themselves.
Some Western academics and organizations are promoting very specific forms of deliberation as universal cures for democratic malaises. I don’t believe these ‘cures’ can simply be transplanted and operate beyond the context of resource-rich countries, but what’s even more important, promoting this kind of institution without attention to the effects of such broad generalizations can lead to very concrete detrimental outcomes: much like ‘citizen participation’ became a buzzword in international development in the 1990s and crawled its way into the conditions for international loans and third-sector funding, we are slowly seeing citizen assemblies and sortition becoming the new international standard for ‘good’ participation. Communities across the world face serious challenges in translating these demands, but might soon need to commit to implementing sortition-based processes just as a condition to receive funding that their projects and collective organization depends on.
Deliberation is taking place already, everywhere across the world. While some processes and institutions are particularly suited to concrete ends, such as citizen assemblies and mini-publics, social change is always grassroots and always in the making. My humble call is to look to those places where deliberative action is already happening out there, to look and learn about how they emerge, thrive, decay, and create the opportunities for other new processes to begin.
Nicole Curato. I think most global processes have been too Western oriented, but this is slowly changing. Melisa and I, together with our colleagues from around the world, have been advocating to ‘decolonize’ our knowledge about deliberative democracy. This doesn’t just mean recognizing that there are non-Western voices, and therefore, we need to incorporate these voices in policymaking and implementation. This also means realizing that countries in the Global North have the luxury of ‘innovating’ democratic processes because their democratic systems are built on the exploitation of societies from the Global South and indigenous communities.
In Australia, for example, my team and I have conducted citizens’ juries at the Old Parliament House in Canberra. The thinking behind it is we want our participants to sit in the chambers where MPs used to deliberate (before they moved to the new Parliament building) and feel the ‘power’ of deliberation. What we conveniently forget is that the same building where we hold deliberations is built on land stolen from indigenous people. There is literally an Aboriginal tent embassy across the Old Parliament House, which I believe is the longest, continuous occupation in the world, to assert their visibility – their existence – given the history of land grabbing and colonial violence that nearly obliterated their communities. I, personally, am still reflecting why it took so long for me to problematize this, the extent to which I am complicit with my on-going violence against colonial people, and only see the ‘democratic innovation’ happening in the Old Parliament House, without realizing that our democratic innovation was only made possible by denying we are holding deliberations on stolen land.
« Deliberation may have different ‘look and feel’ in various places, and our task as scholars and advocates of deliberative democracy is to celebrate the plurality of expressions of deliberation, instead of imposing a single ‘gold standard’ of what good deliberation means.
Nicole
Missions Publiques: To sum up, the current trend in the West is to think about deliberation in terms of problem-framing and decision-making. What are the inspiring examples of deliberation that you have observed in the Global South?
Melisa Ross. Other processes across the world have repeatedly shown that deliberation takes place not only in multiple forms and settings, but also at other stages of the policy process. Deliberation is much more than a group of people in a room debating recommendations, and this is well documented in the global databases I mentioned above.
For example, LATINNO registers cases of participation and deliberation that even operate over multiple stages of the policy cycle at the same time, from problem definition to evaluation and learning. These can be ‘invited spaces’ created by governments, such consultative councils convened by the government to co-govern over specific policy areas like LGBT+ Rights or Labor regulation. But there are other examples where communities co-govern with, without or despite the State, for instance through environmental action or participatory planning.
I find particularly fascinating some citizen-led institutions for the community management of decentralized services, which is very typical of rural Latin American communities where water and electricity supplies are lacking because it’s not profitable for companies to install infrastructure. In those places, communities take the matter into their own hands- we see everyday citizens learning to operate complex infrastructure such as purifying and distributing drinking water across their communities through deliberative action. Here, communities do not need sortition, but instead develop responses to their urgent needs by relying on that human capacity to exchange with each other, to weigh options, to take collective decisions, and to collaborate in implementing them.
Nicole Curato. In Australia, there is a huge push to listen to the voices of indigenous communities and learn from the way they deliberate and make decisions. Long before democratic theorists made a case for the importance of listening to non-human others, representing nature in our deliberations, indigenous communities have already deliberated in this manner, realizing that human deliberation is inextricably tied to deliberation with nature.
(1) Nicole Curato is a Professor of political Sociology at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra and Melisa Ross is a researcher of the Healthier Democracies project led by Public Agenda in New York (USA).(2)Global Assembly
