OECD: “The OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes are intended for any public official or public institution interested in carrying out a citizen participation process. The guidelines describe ten steps for designing, planning, implementing and evaluating a citizen participation process, and discuss eight different methods for involving citizens: information and data, open meetings, public consultations, open innovation, citizen science, civic monitoring, participatory budgeting and representative deliberative processes. The guidelines are illustrated with examples as well as practical guidance built on evidence gathered by the OECD. Finally, nine guiding principles are presented to help ensure the quality of these processes…(More)”.
Towards a permanent citizens’ participatory mechanism in the EU
Report by Alberto Alemanno: “This study, commissioned by the European Parliament’s Policy Department for Citizens’ Rights and Constitutional Affairs at the request of the AFCO Committee, examines the EU participatory system and its existing participatory channels against mounting citizens’ expectations for greater participation in EU decision making in the aftermath of the Conference on the Future of Europe. It proposes the creation of a permanent deliberative mechanism entailing the participation of randomly selected citizens tasked to provide advice upon some of the proposals originating from either existing participation channels or the EU institutions, in an attempt at making the EU more democratically responsive…(More)”
Citizens can effectively monitor the integrity of their elections: Evidence from Colombia
Paper by Natalia Garbiras-Díaz and Mateo Montenegro: “ICT-enabled monitoring tools effectively encourage citizens to oversee their elections and reduce fraud
Despite many efforts by governments and international organizations to guarantee free and fair elections, in many democracies, electoral integrity continues to be threatened. Irregularities including fraud, vote buying or voter intimidation reduce political accountability, which can distort the allocation of public goods and services (Hicken 2011, Khemani 2015).
But why is it so hard to prevent and curb electoral irregularities? While traditional strategies such as the deployment of electoral observers and auditors have proven effective (Hyde 2010, Enikolopov et al. 2013, Leefers and Vicente 2019), these are difficult to scale up and involve large investments in the training, security and transportation of personnel to remote and developing areas.
In Garbiras-Díaz and Montenegro (2022), we designed and implemented a large-scale field experiment during the election period in Colombia to study an innovative and light-touch strategy that circumvents many of these costs. We examine whether citizens can effectively oversee elections through online platforms, and demonstrate that delegating monitoring to citizens can provide a cost-effective alternative to more traditional strategies. Moreover, with growing access to the internet in developing countries reducing the barriers to online monitoring, this strategy is scalable and can be particularly impactful. Our results show how citizens can be encouraged to monitor elections, and, more importantly, illustrate how this form of monitoring can prevent politicians from using electoral irregularities to undermine the integrity of elections…(More)”.
Co-Producing Sustainability Research with Citizens: Empirical Insights from Co-Produced Problem Frames with Randomly Selected Citizens
Paper by Mareike Blum: “In sustainability research, knowledge co-production can play a supportive role at the science-policy interface (Norström et al., 2020). However, so far most projects involved stakeholders in order to produce ‘useful knowledge’ for policy-makers. As a novel approach, research projects have integrated randomly selected citizens during the knowledge co-production to make policy advice more reflective of societal perspectives and thereby increase its epistemic quality. Researchers are asked to consider citizens’ beliefs and values and integrate these in their ongoing research. This approach rests on pragmatist philosophy, according to which a joint deliberation on value priorities and anticipated consequences of policy options ideally allows to co-develop sustainable and legitimate policy pathways (Edenhofer & Kowarsch, 2015; Kowarsch, 2016). This paper scrutinizes three promises of involving citizens in the problem framing: (1) creating input legitimacy, (2) enabling social learning among citizens and researchers and (3) resulting in high epistemic quality of the co-produced knowledge. Based on empirical data the first phase of two research projects in Germany were analysed and compared: The Ariadne research project on the German Energy Transition, and the Biesenthal Forest project at the local level in Brandenburg, Germany. We found that despite barriers exist; learning was enabled by confronting researchers with problem perceptions of citizens. The step when researchers interpret and translate problem frames in the follow-up knowledge production is most important to assess learning and epistemic quality…(More)”.
Democratic innovation and digital participation
Nesta Report: “Overcoming barriers in democratic innovations to harness the collective intelligence of citizens for a 21st-century democracy.
This report sets out the need for democratic innovations and digital participation tools to move beyond one-off pilots toward more embedded and inclusive systems of decision-making.
This is the first comprehensive analysis of the barriers experienced by democratic innovators around the world. Alongside the barriers, we have captured the enablers that can help advance these innovations and tools to their full potential.
The report is published alongside the advancing democratic innovation toolkit which supports institutions, practitioners and technologists to diagnose the barriers that they face and identify the enablers they can use to address them.
This report is based on insights from global examples of digital democratic innovation, and in particular, three pilots from the COLDIGIT project: a citizens’ assembly in Trondheim, Norway; participatory budgeting in Gothenburg, Sweden; and participatory budgeting in Helsinki, Finland.
The work is a collaboration between Nesta, Digidem Lab, University of Gothenburg, University of Helsinki and SINTEF funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)….(More)”.
Participatory Data Governance: How Small Changes Can Lead to Greater Inclusion
Essay by Kate Richards and Martina Barbero: “What the majority of participatory data governance approaches have in common is strong collaboration between public authorities and civil society organizations and representatives of communities that have been historically marginalized and excluded or who are at risk of being marginalized. This leads to better data and evidence for policy-making. For instance, a partnership between the Canadian government and First Nations communities led Statistics Canada to better understand the factors that exacerbate exclusion and capture the lived experiences of these communities.
These practices are pivotal for increasing inclusion and accountability in data beyond the data collection stage. In fact, while inclusion at the data collection phase remains extremely important, participatory data governance approaches can be adopted at any stage of the data lifecycle.
- Before data collection starts: Building relationships with communities at risk of being marginalized helps clarify “what to count” and how to embed the needs and aspirations of vulnerable populations in new data collection approaches. The National Department of Statistics in Colombia’s (DANE) multi-year work with Indigenous communities enabled the statistical office to change their population survey approach, leading to more inclusive data policies.
- After data is collected: Collaborating with civil society organizations enables public authorities to assess how and through which channels data should be shared with target communities. When the government of Buenos Aires wanted to provide information to increase access to sexual and reproductive health services, it worked with civil society to gather feedback and develop a platform that would be useful and accessible to the target population.
- At the stage of data use: Participatory approaches for data inclusion also support greater data use, both by public authorities and by external stakeholders. In Medellin, Colombia, the availability of more granular and more inclusive data on teen pregnancy enabled the government to develop better prevention policies and establish personalized services for girls at risk, resulting in a reduction of teen pregnancies by 30%. In Rosario, Argentina, the government’s partnership with associations representing persons with disabilities led to the development of much more accessible and inclusive public portals, which in turn resulted in better access to services for all citizens…(More)”.
Hosting an Online World Café to Develop an Understanding of Digital Health Promoting Settings from a Citizen’s Perspective—Methodological Potentials and Challenges
Paper by Joanna Albrecht: “Brown and Isaacs’ World Café is a participatory research method to make connections to the ideas of others. During the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and the corresponding contact restrictions, only digital hostings of World Cafés were possible. This article aims to present and reflect on the potentials and challenges of hosting online World Cafés and to derive recommendations for other researchers. Via Zoom and Conceptboard, three online World Cafés were conducted in August 2021. In the World Cafés, the main focus was on the increasing digitization in settings in the context of health promotion and prevention from the perspective of setting members of educational institutions, leisure clubs, and communities. Between 9 and 13 participants participated in three World Cafés. Hosting comprises the phases of design and preparation, realisation, and evaluation. Generally, hosting an online World Café is a suitable method for participatory engagement, but particular challenges have to be overcome. Overall café hosts must create an equal participation environment by ensuring the availability of digital devices and stable internet access. The event schedule must react flexibly to technical disruptions and varying participation numbers. Further, compensatory measures such as support in the form of technical training must be implemented before the event. Finally, due to the higher complexity of digitalisation, roles of participants and staff need to be distributed and coordinated…(More)”.
Top-Down and Bottom-Up Solutions to the Problem of Political Ignorance
Chapter by Hana Samaržija and Quassim Cassam: “There is broad, though not universal, agreement that widespread voter ignorance and irrational evaluation of evidence are serious threats to democracy. But there is deep disagreement over strategies for mitigating the danger. ‘Top-down’ approaches, such as epistocracy and lodging more authority in the hands of experts, seek to mitigate ignorance by concentrating more political power in the hands of the more knowledgeable segments of the population. By contrast, ‘bottom-up’ approaches seek to either raise the political competence of the general public or empower ordinary people in ways that give them better incentives to make good decisions than conventional ballot-box voting does. Examples of bottom-up strategies include increasing voter knowledge through education, various ‘sortition’ proposals, and also shifting more decisions to institutions where citizens can ‘vote with their feet’.
This chapter surveys and critiques a range of both top-down and bottom-up strategies. I conclude that top-down strategies have systematic flaws that severely limit their potential. While they should not be categorically rejected, we should be wary of adopting them on a large scale. Bottom-up strategies have significant limitations of their own. But expanding foot voting opportunities holds more promise than any other currently available option. The idea of paying voters to increase their knowledge also deserves serious consideration…(More)”.
Mapping community resources for disaster preparedness: humanitarian data capability and automated futures
Report by Anthony McCosker et al: “The project seeks to enable local community disaster preparedness and thus build community resilience by improving the quality of data about community strengths, resources and assets.
In this report, the authors define a gap in existing humanitarian mapping approaches and the uses of open, public and social media data in humanitarian contexts. The report surveys current knowledge and present a selection of case studies delivering data and humanitarian mapping in local communities.
Drawing on this knowledge and practice review and stakeholder workshops throughout 2021, the authors also define a method and toolkit for the effective use of community assets data…(More)”
Transforming public policy with engaged scholarship: better together
Blog by Alana Cattapan & Tobin LeBlanc Haley: “The expertise of people with lived experience is receiving increased attention within policy making arenas. Yet consultation processes have, for the most part, been led by public servants, with limited resources provided for supporting the community engagement vital to the inclusion of lived experience experts in policy making. What would policy decisions look like if the voices of the communities who live with the consequences of these decisions were prioritised not only in consultation processes, but in determining priorities and policy processes from the outset? This is one of the questions we explore in our recent article published in the special issue on Transformational Change in Public Policy.
As community-engaged policy researchers, along with Leah Levac, Laura Pin, Ethel Tungohan and Sarah Marie Wiebe, our attention has been focused on how to engage meaningfully and work together with the communities impacted by our research, the very communities often systematically excluded from policy processes. Across our different research programmes, we work together with people experiencing precarious housing and homelessness, migrant workers, northern and Indigenous women, First Nations, and trans and gender diverse people. The lessons we have learned in our research with these communities are useful for our work and for these communities, as well as for policy makers and other actors wanting to engage meaningfully with community stakeholders.
Our new article, “Transforming Public Policy with Engaged Scholarship: Better Together,” describes these lessons, showing how engaged scholarship can inform the meaningful inclusion of people with lived expertise in public policy making. We draw on Marianne Beaulieu, Mylaine Breton and Astrid Brouselle’s work to focus on four principles of engaged scholarship. The principles we focus on include prioritising community needs, practicing reciprocity, recognising multiple ways of knowing, and crossing disciplinary and sectoral boundaries. Using five vignettes from our own research, we link these principles to our practice, highlighting how policy makers can do the same. In one vignette, co-author Sarah Marie Wiebe describes how her research with people in Aamjiwnaang in Canada was made possible through the sustained time and effort of relationship building and learning about the lived experiences of community members. As she explains in the article, this work included sensing the pollution in the surrounding atmosphere firsthand through participation in a “toxic tour” of the community’s location next to Canada’s Chemical Valley. In another vignette, co-author Ethel Tungohan details how migrant community leaders led a study looking at migrant workers’ housing precarity, enabling more responsive forms of engagement with municipal policy makers who tend to ignore migrant workers’ housing issues….(More)”.