We may have overdone it on citizens’ assemblies

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Article by David Farrell: “Ireland has citizens’ assemblies aplenty. A few weeks ago the Cabinet gave the green light for two new citizens’ assemblies on biodiversity and a Dublin mayor. This immediately prompted a debate in the Oireachtas over why the Dublin mayor citizens’ assembly is being prioritised over one on drugs use that was promised in the Programme for Government, along with citizens’ assemblies on rural youth and the future of education. Almost every day there are groups calling for still more citizens’ assemblies: the recent list includes such topics as a united Ireland, the funding of our armed forces, and a new forest strategy.

This all comes hot on the heels of three previous assemblies since 2012, the most recent of which, the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, completed its work last year and, after some delay, its well-considered report is about to be considered by a special Oireachtas committee, chaired by Ivana Bacik.

It’s no wonder that Ireland is seen as a leading light in the world of citizens’ assemblies: they have made important contributions on issues like abortion and gay marriage. But these high-profile successes disguise the fact that many, many other recommendations from previous assemblies have been ignored, rejected, or left to gather dust: that’s a lot of time and effort (not least by citizens’ assembly members) and public funding wasted for rather little return…(More)”.

Still Muted: The Limited Participatory Democracy of Zoom Public Meetings

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Katherine Levine Einstein: “Recent research has demonstrated that participants in public meetings are unrepresentative of their broader communities. Some suggest that reducing barriers to meeting attendance can improve participation, while others believe doing so will produce minimal changes. The COVID-19 pandemic shifted public meetings online, potentially reducing the time costs associated with participating. We match participants at online public meetings with administrative data to learn whether: (1) online participants are representative of their broader communities and (2) representativeness improves relative to in-person meetings. We find that participants in online forums are quite similar to those in in-person ones. They are similarly unrepresentative of residents in their broader communities and similarly overwhelmingly opposed to the construction of new housing. These results suggest important limitations to public meeting reform. Future research should continue to unpack whether reforms might prove more effective at redressing inequalities in an improved economic and public health context…(More)”.

Direct democracy and equality: a global perspective

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anna Krämling et al: “Direct democracy is seen as a potential cure to the malaise of representative democracy. It is increasingly used worldwide. However, research on the effects of direct democracy on important indicators like socio-economic, legal, and political equality is scarce, and mainly limited to Europe and the US. The global perspective is missing. This article starts to close this gap. It presents descriptive findings on direct democratic votes at the national level in the (partly) free countries of the Global South and Oceania between 1990 and 2015. It performs the first comparative analysis of direct democracy on these continents. Contradicting concerns that direct democracy may be a threat to equality, we found more bills aimed at increasing equality. Likewise, these votes produced more pro- than contra-equality outputs. This held for all continents as well as for all dimensions of equality….(More)”.

A tale of two labs: Rethinking urban living labs for advancing citizen engagement in food system transformations

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Anke Brons et al: “Citizen engagement is heralded as essential for food democracy and equality, yet the implementation of inclusive citizen engagement mechanisms in urban food systems governance has lagged behind. This paper aims to further the agenda of citizen engagement in the transformation towards healthy and sustainable urban food systems by offering a conceptual reflection on urban living labs (ULLs) as a methodological platform. Over the past decades, ULLs have become increasingly popular to actively engage citizens in methodological testbeds for innovations within real-world settings. The paper proposes that ULLs as a tool for inclusive citizen engagement can be utilized in two ways: (i) the ULL as the daily life of which citizens are the experts, aimed at uncovering the unreflexive agency of a highly diverse population in co-shaping the food system and (ii) the ULL as a break with daily life aimed at facilitating reflexive agency in (re)shaping food futures. We argue that both ULL approaches have the potential to facilitate inclusive citizen engagement in different ways by strengthening the breadth and the depth of citizen engagement respectively. The paper concludes by proposing a sequential implementation of the two types of ULL, paying attention to spatial configurations and the short-termed nature of ULLs….(More)”.

What Works? Developing a global evidence base for public engagement

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Report by Reema Patel and Stephen Yeo: “…the Wellcome Trust commissioned OTT Consulting to recommend the best approach for enabling public engagement communities to share and gather evidence on public engagement practice globally, and in particular to assess the suitability of an approach adapted from the UK ‘What Works Centres’. This report is the output from that commission. It draws from a desk-based literature review, workshops in India, Peru and the UK, and a series of stakeholder interviews with international organisations.

The key themes that emerged from stakeholder interviews and workshops were that, in order for evidence about public engagement to help inform and shape public engagement practice, and for public engagement to be used and deployed effectively, there has to be an approach that can: understand the audiences, broaden out how ‘evidence’ is understood and generated, think strategically about how evidence affects and informs practice and understand the complexity of the system dynamics within which public engagement (and evidence about public engagement) operates….(More)”.

A Framework for Open Civic Design: Integrating Public Participation, Crowdsourcing, and Design Thinking

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Brandon Reynante, Steven P. Dow, Narges Mahyar: “Civic problems are often too complex to solve through traditional top-down strategies. Various governments and civic initiatives have explored more community-driven strategies where citizens get involved with defining problems and innovating solutions. While certain people may feel more empowered, the public at large often does not have accessible, flexible, and meaningful ways to engage. Prior theoretical frameworks for public participation typically offer a one-size-fits-all model based on face-to-face engagement and fail to recognize the barriers faced by even the most engaged citizens. In this article, we explore a vision for open civic design where we integrate theoretical frameworks from public engagement, crowdsourcing, and design thinking to consider the role technology can play in lowering barriers to large-scale participation, scaffolding problem-solving activities, and providing flexible options that cater to individuals’ skills, availability, and interests. We describe our novel theoretical framework and analyze the key goals associated with this vision: (1) to promote inclusive and sustained participation in civics; (2) to facilitate effective management of large-scale participation; and (3) to provide a structured process for achieving effective solutions. We present case studies of existing civic design initiatives and discuss challenges, limitations, and future work related to operationalizing, implementing, and testing this framework…(More)”.

Citizen Power Europe. The Making of a European Citizens’ Assembly

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Alberto Alemanno and Kalypso Nicolaïdis: “This article argues that if the EU is to recover its dented popularity among European publics, we need to build a European democratic ecosystem to nurture, scale and ultimate accommodate the daily competing claims of Europe’s citizens. To attain this objective, it presents and discusses three big ideas that are at the heart of the renewed EU ecosystem that we are calling for. These are: participation beyond voting; a transnational and inclusive public space; and, a democratic panopticon for greater accountability. Promisingly enough, these ideas already find reflection in the first batch of the citizens’ recommendations emerging from the Conference on the Future of Europe (CoFoE). Even if these recommendations still need to be refined through deliberation by the plenary of the CoFoE, they add up a clear and urgent message: let’s tap into our collective intelligence and democratic imagination to construct a pan-European public sphere by enhancing mutual connections, knowledge and empowerment between citizens across borders…(More)”.

A data-based participatory approach for health equity and digital inclusion: prioritizing stakeholders

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Aristea Fotopoulou, Harriet Barratt, and Elodie Marandet: “This article starts from the premise that projects informed by data science can address social concerns, beyond prioritizing the design of efficient products or services. How can we bring the stakeholders and their situated realities back into the picture? It is argued that data-based, participatory interventions can improve health equity and digital inclusion while avoiding the pitfalls of top-down, technocratic methods. A participatory framework puts users, patients and citizens as stakeholders at the centre of the process, and can offer complex, sustainable benefits, which go beyond simply the experience of participation or the development of an innovative design solution. A significant benefit for example is the development of skills, which should not be seen as a by-product of the participatory processes, but a central element of empowering marginalized or excluded communities to participate in public life. By drawing from different examples in various domains, the article discusses what can be learnt from implementations of schemes using data science for social good, human-centric design, arts and wellbeing, to argue for a data-centric, creative and participatory approach to address health equity and digital inclusion in tandem…(More)”.

Toward A Collaborative Smart City: A Play-Based Urban Living Laboratory in Boston

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Paper by Eric Gordon, John Harlow, Melissa Teng & Elizabeth Christoferetti: This article reports on an urban living laboratory that designed a suite of play-based prototypes, as an attempt to “institution” collaborative smart city governance in the city of Boston. This project was called “Beta Blocks,” and it geographically defined “Exploration Zones,” governed by local residents and business owners, who decided whether, where, and why to temporarily install technologies in the public realm. To recruit and facilitate the participation of Zone Advisory Group members, the authors fabricated a lavender, parking-space-sized, inflatable art exhibition (Beta Blob) that hosted a suite of public-facing activities. Although the composite model failed at “institutioning” itself into Boston’s government through this prototype, the discrete components succeeded in centering play in public learning situations and prototyping a model for collaborative governance between publics, and the public and private sectors…(More)”.

Research Anthology on Citizen Engagement and Activism for Social Change

Curated on Posted on by Stefaan Verhulst

Book by the Information Resources Management Association (IRMA): “Activism and the role everyday people play in making a change in society are increasingly popular topics in the world right now, especially as younger generations begin to speak out. From traditional protests to activities on college campuses, to the use of social media, more individuals are finding accessible platforms with which to share their views and become more actively involved in politics and social welfare. With the emergence of new technologies and a spotlight on important social issues, people are able to become more involved in society than ever before as they fight for what they believe. It is essential to consider the recent trends, technologies, and movements in order to understand where society is headed in the future.

The Research Anthology on Citizen Engagement and Activism for Social Change examines a plethora of innovative research surrounding social change and the various ways citizens are involved in shaping society. Covering topics such as accountability, social media, voter turnout, and leadership, it is an ideal work for activists, sociologists, social workers, politicians, public administrators, sociologists, journalists, policymakers, social media analysts, government administrators, academicians, researchers, practitioners, and students….(More)”.