Paper by Rebecca Wells, Candice Howarth & Lina I. Brand-Correa: “In light of increasing pressure to deliver climate action targets and the growing role of citizens in raising the importance of the issue, deliberative democratic processes (e.g. citizen juries and citizen assemblies) on climate change are increasingly being used to provide a voice to citizens in climate change decision-making. Through a comparative case study of two processes that ran in the UK in 2019 (the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury and the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change), this paper investigates how far citizen assemblies and juries are increasing citizen engagement on climate change and creating more citizen-centred climate policymaking. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, councillors, professional facilitators and others involved in running these processes to assess motivations for conducting these, their structure and the impact and influence they had. The findings suggest the impact of these processes is not uniform: they have an indirect impact on policy making by creating momentum around climate action and supporting the introduction of pre-planned or pre-existing policies rather than a direct impact by truly being citizen-centred policy making processes or conducive to new climate policy. We conclude with reflections on how these processes give elected representatives a public mandate on climate change, that they help to identify more nuanced and in-depth public opinions in a fair and informed way, yet it can be challenging to embed citizen juries and assemblies in wider democratic processes….(More)”.
It’s not all about populism: grassroots democracy is thriving across Europe
Richard Youngs at The Guardian: “The past decade has been a bruising one for the health of European democracy. The dramatic authoritarian turns in Hungary and Poland have attracted most attention, but nearly all European governments have chipped away at civil liberties, judicial independence and civil society.
With Covid accentuating many of the challenges posed by populism, disinformation and a collapse in public trust, the narrative of democracy labouring in deep crisis is now well established. Yet as the threats have mounted, so have efforts to defend and rethink Europe’s democratic practices.
Most spontaneously, there has been an increase in the frequency and intensity of mass protests, even during the pandemic, many in support of democratic values. People have mobilised against corruption or around particular policy issues and then taken on a broader democratic reform agenda. This has been the case in Bulgaria, Romania and Slovakia, the women’s strike in Poland, the Sardines movement in Italy, the Million Moments movement in the Czech Republic and protests in Malta initially triggered by journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia’s murder. Climate movements such as Extinction Rebellion are also beginning to marry their ecology demands to concerns with democratic reform. People invented new forms of protest under Covid: for example, Polish citizens protested against new abortion laws and the timing of elections by taking to their cars in procession, honking horns and playing alarms out of their windows, still in full compliance with restrictions on public gatherings.
New civil society initiatives aim at tackling polarisation. One example is a project called Arguments Against Aggression, which tries to equip people with more empathetic communication and debating skills than those typically experienced on social media and has now run in seven EU member states. Meanwhile, Covid has given rise to hundreds of civic mutual aid initiatives, such as En Première Ligne in France whose website puts those who need help directly in touch with local volunteers. Civil society organisations are also working more closely with protest movements. The Corruption Kills group in Romania, for example, evolved from anti-corruption protests and an outpouring of public anger at the deaths of more than 60 people in a nightclub fire. Online initiatives, meanwhile, are reclaiming the positive democratic potential of digital technology, finding new formats to feed citizens’ views into policymaking.
More and more citizens’ assemblies have sprung up…(More)”.
The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue
Report by the Congressional Management Foundation: “The Future of Citizen Engagement: Rebuilding the Democratic Dialogue” explores the current challenges to engagement and trust between Senators and Representatives and their constituents; proposes principles for rebuilding that fundamental democratic relationship; and describes innovative practices in federal, state, local, and international venues that Congress could look to for modernizing the democratic dialogue.
The report answers the following questions:
- What factors have contributed to the deteriorating state of communications between citizens and Congress?
- What principles should guide Congress as it tries to transform its communications systems and practices from administrative transactions to substantive interactions with the People it represents?
- What models at the state and international level can Congress follow as it modernizes and rebuilds the democratic dialogue?
The findings and recommendations in this report are based on CMF’s long history of researching the relationship between Members of Congress and their constituents…(More)”.
Citizen Needs – To Be Considered
Paper by Franzisca Maas, Sara Wolf, Anna Hohm and Jörn Hurtienne outlining “Requirements for Local Civic Participation Tools. In this paper, we argue for and present an empirical study of putting citizens into focus during the early stages of designing tools for civic participation in a mid-sized German town. Drawing on Contextual and Participatory Design, we involved 105 participants by conducting interviews, using Photovoice and participating in a local neighbourhood meeting.
Together with citizens, we built an Affinity Diagram, consolidated the data and identified key insights. As a result, we present and discuss different participation identities such as Motivated Activists, Convenience Participants or Companions and a collection of citizen needs for local civic participation, e. g., personal contact is irreplaceable for motivation, trust and mutual understanding, and some citizens preferred to “stumble across” information rather than actively searching for it. We use existing participation tools to demonstrate how individual needs could be addressed. Finally, we apply our insights to an example in our local context. We conclude that if we want to build digital tools that go beyond tokenistic, top-down ways of civic participation and that treat citizens as one homogeneous group, citizens need to be part of the design process right from the start. Supplemental material can be retrieved from https://osf.io/rxd7h/….(More)”
Participatory data stewardship
Report by the Ada Lovelace Institute: “Well-managed data can support organisations, researchers, governments and corporations to conduct lifesaving health research, reduce environmental harms and produce societal value for individuals and communities. But these benefits are often overshadowed by harms, as current practices in data collection, storage, sharing and use have led to high-profile misuses of personal data, data breaches and sharing scandals.
These range from the backlash to Care.Data, to the response to Cambridge Analytica and Facebook’s collection and use of data for political advertising. These cumulative scandals have resulted in ‘tenuous’ public trust in data sharing, which entrenches public concern about data and impedes its use in the public interest. To reverse this trend, what is needed is increased legitimacy, and increased trustworthiness, of data and AI use.
This report proposes a ‘framework for participatory data stewardship’, which rejects practices of data collection, storage, sharing and use in ways that are opaque or seek to manipulate people, in favour of practices that empower people to help inform, shape and – in some instances – govern their own data.
As a critical component of good data governance, it proposes data stewardship as the responsible use, collection and management of data in a participatory and rights-preserving way, informed by values and engaging with questions of fairness.
Drawing extensively from Sherry Arnstein’s ‘ladder of citizen participation’ and its more recent adaptation into a spectrum, this new framework is based on an analysis of over 100 case studies of different methods of participatory data stewardship. It demonstrates ways that people can gain increasing levels of control and agency over their data – from being informed about what is happening to data about themselves, through to being empowered to take responsibility for exercising and actively managing decisions about data governance….(More)”.
Kansas City expands civic engagement with data stories, virtual ‘lunch-and-learns’
Ryan Johnston at Statescoop: “…The city is currently running a series of virtual “lunch-and-learns,” as well as publishing data-driven “stories” using Socrata software to improve civic engagement, said Kate Bender, a senior management analyst in the city’s data division.
The work is especially important in reaching residents that aren’t equipped with digital literacy or data analysis skills, Bender said. The free lunch-and-learns — managed under the new Office of Citizen Engagement — teaches residents how to use digital tools like the city’s open data portal and 311 mobile app.
New data stories, meanwhile, published on the city’s open data portal, allow residents to see the context behind raw data around COVID-19, 311 requests or city hiring practices that they might not otherwise be able to parse themselves. They’re both part of an effort to reach residents that aren’t already plugged in to the city’s digital channels, Bender said.
“Knowing that we have more digital options and we have good engagement, how can we open up residents’ exposure to other things, and specifically tools, that we make available, that we put on our website or that we tweet about?” Bender said. “Unless you’re already pretty engaged, you might not know or think to download the city’s 311 app, or you might have heard of open data, but not really know how it pertains to you. So that was our concept.”
Bender’s office, DataKC, has “always been pretty closely aligned in working with 311 and advising on citizen engagement,” Bender said. But when COVID-19 hit and people could no longer gather in-person for citizen engagement events, like the city’s “Community Engagement University,” a free, 8-week, in-person program that taught residents about how various city agencies work, Bender and her team decided to take the education component virtual….(More)”.
Looking to the future? Including children, young people and future generations in deliberations on climate action: Ireland’s Citizens’Assembly 2016–2018
Paper by Clodagh Harris: “The effects of climate change are multiple and fundamental. Decisions made today may result in irreversible damage to the planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems, the detrimental impacts of which will be borne by today’s children, young people and those yet unborn (future generations). The use of citizens’ assemblies (CAs) to tackle the issue of climate change is growing. Their remit is future focused. Yet is the future in the room? Focusing on a single case study, the recent Irish CA and Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action (JOCCA) deliberations on climate action, this paper explores the extent to which children, young people and future generations were included. Its systemic analysis of the membership of both institutions, the public submissions to them and the invited expertise presented, finds that the Irish CA was ‘too tightly coupled’ on this issue. This may have been beneficial in terms of impact, but it came at the expense of input legitimacy and potentially intergenerational justice. Referring to international developments, it suggests how these groups may be included through enclave deliberation, institutional innovations, design experiments and future-oriented practice…(More)”
Do Voters Trust Deliberative Minipublics? Examining the Origins and Impact of Legitimacy Perceptions for the Citizens’ Initiative Review
Paper by Kristinn Már & John Gastil: “Deliberative theorists argue that democracies face an increasing legitimacy crisis for lack of effective representation and robust decision-making processes. To address this problem, democratic reformers designed minipublics, such as Citizens Juries, Citizens Assemblies, and Deliberative Polls. Little is known, however, about who trusts minipublics and why. We use survey experiments to explore whether minipublics in three US states were able to influence the electorate’s policy knowledge and voting choices and whether such influences hinged on legitimacy. On average, respondents were uncertain or tilted towards distrust of these minipublics. We found higher levels of trust among people of color compared to Whites, poor compared to rich, and young compared to old. Specific information about minipublic design features did not boost their perceived legitimacy. In fact, one result suggests that awareness of balanced partisan testimony decreased trust. Finally, results show that minipublics can sway voters and improve knowledge, above and beyond the effects of a conventional voter pamphlet, but these effects were largely independent of minipublic trust….(More)”
Indigenous Peoples Rise Up: The Global Ascendency of Social Media Activism
Book edited by Bronwyn Carlson and Jeff Berglund: “…llustrates the impact of social media in expanding the nature of Indigenous communities and social movements. Social media has bridged distance, time, and nation states to mobilize Indigenous peoples to build coalitions across the globe and to stand in solidarity with one another. These movements have succeeded and gained momentum and traction precisely because of the strategic use of social media. Social media—Twitter and Facebook in particular—has also served as a platform for fostering health, well-being, and resilience, recognizing Indigenous strength and talent, and sustaining and transforming cultural practices when great distances divide members of the same community.
Including a range of international indigenous voices from the US, Canada, Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand) and Africa, the book takes an interdisciplinary approach, bridging Indigenous studies, media studies, and social justice studies. Including examples like Idle No More in Canada, Australian Recognise!, and social media campaigns to maintain Maori language, Indigenous Peoples Rise Up serves as one of the first studies of Indigenous social media use and activism…(More)”.
Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective
Book by Brian Wampler, Stephanie McNulty, and Michael Touchton: “Participatory Budgeting continues to spread across the globe as government officials and citizens adopt this innovative democratic program in the hopes of strengthening accountability, civil society, and well-being. Governments often adapt PB’s basic program design to meet local needs, thus creating wide variation in how PB programs function. Some programs retain features of radical democracy, others focus on community mobilization, and yet other programs seek to promote participatory development. Participatory Budgeting in Global Perspective provides a theoretical and empirical explanation to account for widespread variation in PB’s adoption, adaptation, and impacts. This book develops six “PB types” to account for the wide variation in how PB programs function as well as the outcomes they produce. To illustrate the similar patterns across the globe, four empirical chapters present a rich set of case studies that illuminate the wide differences among these programs; chapters are organized regionally, with chapters on Latin America, Asia, Sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and North America. By organizing the chapters regionally, it becomes clear that there are temporal, spatial, economic, and organizational factors that produce different programs across regions, but similar programs within each region. A key empirical finding is that the change in PB rules and design is now leading to significant differences in the outcomes these programs produce. We find that some programs successfully promote accountability, expand civil society, and improve well-being but, too often, researchers do not have any evidence tying PB to significant social or political change….(More)”.