Sign up to receive emails from Carnegie!
Check your email for more main points about your application.
Recent allocations to encourage citizen participation in Europe, Australia and Canada have attracted a lot of attention, especially selection-based “mini-hearings”, one of which, citizens’ assemblies, is becoming increasingly popular. However, new forms of participation have also emerged. in other countries and regions of the world. Like inventions in Western democracies, they are far from perfect, yet they offer a valuable form for those who wish to expand avenues of democratic participation within Western states. The European Democracy Hub carried out a task on democratic inventions outside the West to explore those lessons. This article synthesizes the effects of the task by categorizing unique types of citizen participation from examples from around the world and identifying their policy implications.
As citizen frustration and alienation from political elites becomes more widespread and severe around the world, as evidenced by the growing number of gigantic anti-government protests around the world, the need for cutting-edge citizen engagement channels is more pressing. On the global push of democratic regression, many positive bureaucracies of such participation have taken shape in recent years. Indeed, many analysts find that a new ethic of citizen participation defines efforts to combat democratic decay.
Selection-based mini-hearings have an impressive track record as a form of citizen engagement. These forums decide on citizens by attracting masses to plan certain political issues. In the West, this style of classification – now systematically implemented with a very complicated stratified variety of techniques to make some representation of sectors of society – is thought of as the popular gold of participation, as it gives all citizens an equivalent possibility to participate and ensures that debates are strongly structured around predefined missions or elaborate molded institutional processes.
While the expansion of classification projects is incredibly positive for democratic renewal, the focus on expanding this specific participatory style risks diverting attention from other democratic innovations. Citizens’ assemblies are not exclusive to the West, but most have been organized into a small organization. of Western states. Deliberative participation also requires more variety in its bureaucracy. 1 This makes it vital to examine the promising bureaucracy of citizen participation being tested around the world and whether Western countries can take advantage of those innovations of choice.
A critical debate has emerged about the need to decolonize deliberation and take more seriously the participatory bureaucracy that evolved outside the West. The technique of decolonization holds that the Western deliberative bureaucracy brings back ancient baggage and identities that restrict its true democratic value. The European Democracy Hub allocation was based on a similar sentiment, even if it did not use the same framework or explicitly weighed whether or not the classification assemblies were suitable for all regions or cultures of the world. inform with its contextual wisdom about other types of inventions outside the Western world.
The task tried to pass more in those critical debates. Decolonization narratives largely concentrate on critiquing Western bureaucracy and end up insisting that others should be encouraged and read. We start from the point where those narratives have an ending to end. we have taken it for granted that Western inventions reflect the entrenched interests and identities of those countries and that it is equally valid and attractive to read about the efforts of all regions, and we have moved directly to another bureaucracy of democratic innovation outside the West.
The task made no a priori assumptions about the superiority of those innovations of choice. The aim was to ask what they can contribute to Western debates on citizen participation, while examining their limitations. Nor does it make radical claims about the main differences between regions: many countries are experimenting with the same kind of participation that is used in Western countries. But some approaches outside the West are different and deserve more attention. Thus, the task tested how countries and societies seek to engage citizens in policymaking in a way that might not have compatibility with the formats used in the West.
The task shows differences with existing Western approaches that can be grouped into 3 groups: first, efforts to expand democratic participation in existing consultative processes; secondly, a more open-minded bureaucracy involving a giant number of citizens; and third, attempts to link citizen participation with other political actors.
First, many public governments have focused on integrating participatory parties into public consultation mechanisms.
Many governments around the world offer consultation mechanisms that allow citizens and concerted interests to participate in new legislative proposals. Most also have some sort of online petition procedure where citizens can ask governments to act on express policy areas. These forms of consultation and petition have evolved significantly but do not involve democratic deliberation as such. Although they are offering citizens the opportunity to link with public government and to put or raise a certain factor on the political agenda, they will not be offering democratically representative options. Participation and decision-making as well as citizen assemblies and tables.
The project’s case studies show that many countries are striving to expand deliberation and wider participation in public consultations, and that in some places this is preferable to the creation of many separate citizens’ assemblies. One of the main bureaucracies of those efforts is to move beyond the norm to more participatory online petitions.
In South Korea, the government has created online petition platforms that facilitate iterative discussion among citizens, as well as between them and policymakers. These platforms are also structured to help solve other problems in combination so that citizens don’t focus on their demands in one factor without understanding. the implications for other policy problems. The aim is to inspire citizens to give constructive advice rather than just making general requests for action. Some governments have held competitions to inspire participation: for example, a municipal government has actively sought out concepts to deal with the coronavirus pandemic, beyond the popular passive form of petition platforms.
In Georgia, the local government has created participatory bodies that involve citizens and deliberation in formal municipal processes, adding the establishment of “civil counsellors” and monitoring the functionality of public officials through citizens. In Nigeria, some governments have introduced a platform for citizens to monitor and provide feedback on local government projects and to have interaction in an open discussion about them among themselves and with local government representatives making plans.
In North Macedonia, the mCommunity initiative allows two-way interaction between citizens and authorities. The authorities take the initiative to invite citizens to participate in decisions and plans. Citizens can make their own advice instead of simply reacting to official plans, then officials respond, and there is a back and forth. Therefore, there is iterative participation with online voting and deliberation throughout the process.
Participatory plan-making processes in most Latin American countries involve online petition processes that feed into multi-cycle deliberations on local public policy priorities. These processes have been subtle through various iterations with the aim of building a back-and-forth co-governance between citizens. and officials.
Such inventions are not completely absent from Western countries, however, non-Western case studies show examples of governments pushing them harder and in a more systemic way. for many citizens, and are strongly embedded in decision-making cycles. They have the merit of modest convenience, speed, and costs. And many seem to have encouraged greater bilateral conversations between citizens and legislators, while the long lists of recommendations that many citizen assemblies have a tendency to produce can disappear smoothly into institutional black holes.
The case studies reveal many types of what might be called “open participation,” which differs from triage-based participation. In Western states, controlled forms of classification have been the central pillar of mini-public deliberation. They have to ensure fair representation of other types of citizens. It also helps keep the number of participants at a predetermined limit. Case studies show that in other parts of the world, a more open form of participation has gained popularity. that the government chooses citizens through lottery, but establishes frameworks that allow a wider diversity of actors to participate in public or networked decision-making. This denotes a more flexible and broader concept of participation than that underlying random variety assemblies and panels. .
Brazil has pioneered many such open bureaucracies that come with stronger links between individual citizen participation and civil society organizations (CSOs), which take positions over a long period of time and result in more ongoing participatory debates. The technique is reflected in national debates. public policy conferences. All of these are multi-layered in the sense of various series and types of forums leading to a procedure in which citizens, CSOs, officials and political parties jointly draft new policies. National dialogues provide another opportunity for individual citizens. to work with other actors through far more degrees of deliberation than single-organ citizens’ popular assemblies. This open-ended bureaucracy became widespread in the 2010s, but was reduced through the government of President Jair Bolsonaro.
Similar processes have also been an integral component of component participation in the rest of Latin America. They have been perfected over many years in Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay. While other countries adopt diversification in open participation, their efforts do not have unusual characteristics. They offer several cumulative cycles of participation at other levels of decision-making and combine officially facilitated deliberation with more informal and open citizen debate.
In India, the Gram Sabhas, inclusive village parliaments, have gradually acquired more deliberative characteristics and manage gigantic budgets (which would possibly explain why they are rarely monopolized by vested interests). Social audits have also become popular; They involve a participatory public hearing in which a giant number of citizens have a fairly structured opportunity to compare local elected representatives.
The Nigerian state of Osun has followed a similar open forum for joint deliberation, based on the classic village discussion forums. This has outgrown its initial prestige as a popular petition and data service to become a more participatory discussion forum for inclusive decision-making.
Proponents of the lottery would no doubt point out that such open-ended bureaucracy cannot compete with the popular lottery of offering representative samples of citizens. Number of citizens.
The case studies describe countries’ efforts to expand a more interconnected participatory bureaucracy. A constant fear about deliberative mini-forums in the West is that they are detached from other channels of democratic participation and sometimes seem to be established as an option to the second (even if their proponents insist that is not the intention). The case studies recommend that other countries could possibly have made more progress in connecting citizens’ direct participation with other democratic actors and places of accountability.
In Taiwan, participatory civic generation in the form of Taiwan’s g0v initiative was fully incorporated into the 2014 Sunflower protest movement, and from there also intrinsically connected to the government’s push for greater transparency. forums that involved large numbers of citizens to correct government mistakes and monitor the Crusade’s budgets and funding. Gradually, the well-known vTaiwan program has focused more on promoting more systematic interaction between online citizenship and public government decision-making.
In South Korea, a randomly selected meeting on nuclear policy led to a formal direct democracy vote that tied the procedure to the broader political cycle and decided on a key policy shift directly opposed to government preference.
The open bureaucracy of participation in Latin America described above, sometimes more structured in its later stages, closer to the final decisions taken, and brings in combination determined delegates of local public policy meetings in combination with elected representatives and social partners in a nominally joint decision to make procedure. Array In this way, a lot of deliberative dialogues at the community level feed into a single national procedure with multiple actors engaged in a specific reform issue.
In Nigeria, the Kaduna state government has used the Open Government Partnership as a platform from which to generate collective participation on issues, connecting leaders with CSOs and, in turn, with citizens.
In Malawi, juries of very small citizens emerged and were organized on a bottom-up basis outside of formal structures, and then worked with local parliamentarians guilty of spending decisions under a progression fund. Participatory local governance tests were also conducted, combining a random variety of individual citizens and stakeholder groups, and a combination of strategies that aggregate iterative questions and comments and direct voting.
Some of the links are aimed at political parties. In Ghana, much of the engagement effort has been channeled through local party forums. an effective way to have political interaction between citizens. In Nigeria, the Election Commission’s Option A4 initiative aimed to directly engage citizens in the variety of applicants across parties to merge the political and civic spheres in a way that sacrificed the secrecy of votes but was more participatory than popular open primaries. In Georgia, a small political party that does not seek public investment has introduced a procedure that allows Americans to apply for jobs on its list based on the amount of budget they have raised through donations. The party also entered citizens in a lottery if they voted (even if they voted for some other party).
Green Human City in Skopje, North Macedonia, combines all those other degrees and actors. It was established through a coalition of CSOs to enable them to appeal to individual citizens and protest movements to refine civil society proposals. The members of the local government are also present and the maximum concepts admitted are submitted to the vote of the local council. Basically, the initiative led citizens to run for work under a Green Human City party ticket. This initiative combines the multiple bureaucracy of participation, from the popular virtual petition to the organized participation of CSOs, protest movements and elected officials. First, it was carried out through civil society in a country where governments were reluctant to explore a new participatory bureaucracy.
In some countries, connections are more noticeable at the CSO level. This is the case in many countries where governments do not develop formal citizen projects and where participatory efforts emerge more from the bottom up, independently of the authorities. This is the case, for example, in the Arab world, where rather conflictive civil society activism is still needed to push for a more democratic space. Here, the technique has been to integrate participatory deliberation into popular civil society campaigns. The examination of the case of Lebanon shows how CSOs have attempted to integrate the use of participatory spaces for ordinary citizens into their classic advocacy tools. This is a far cry from government-led participatory processes in some Western democracies, however, it is a technique that may offer some flexibility where governments are less open to such innovation.
These inventions in non-Western countries deserve not to be idealized. Many of them have struggled to gain ground or have been kidnapped by political interests. strategies that choose corporate representatives through random sweepstakes. These inventions have advantages and disadvantages, and sacrifice a democratic size (e. g. , equality of votes or voting secrecy) to reinforce some other (e. g. , broader contribution or greater deliberation). But, even if they are far from panaceas, the very diversity of these participatory bureaucracies makes them attractive and to be taken into account in debates about democratic renewal in the West.
One of the threads running along these other paths is a network ethos. The various projects in various regions necessarily seek to use citizen participation to federate other spaces for political action and do so through the creation of existing structures. political identities. This is very different from how classification assemblies expressly concentrate on settling in Americans outside of any communal or mediated structure. Another key issue is that virtual teams do not actually create a new participatory bureaucracy by themselves, but rather contribute to making participatory processes more effective. This can be achieved by expanding the scope of an initiative, improving knowledge gathering, or helping to integrate processes into government structures seamlessly.
Ultimately, the good fortune of those inventions is difficult to measure on a constant set of criteria. Success can mean other things elsewhere. Policy adjustments are usually the main feature of a process of good fortune, but those inventions alone cannot replace politics. Some, such as deliberative forums, can only be effective in influencing policymaking if they are replicated on a large scale, meaning that their institutionalization is vital. The plans may have implications for democratic engagement more broadly. At the other end of the scale, any form of open consultation can be particularly useful in countering democratic backsliding. For those fighting for democratic innovation in Europe, a key detail of good fortune is whether those examples are replicable in other contexts across the continent.
The examples presented in this article and in the work from which it emerged are part of a developing movement to try to revitalize democratic participation. Much more remains to be done in the coming years if democracies are to deal with the myriad of difficult situations on the horizon. The diversity of other inventions suggests that there are several institutional mechanisms for finding answers. The cases show that citizens and governments around the world are turning to more democracy than less and are looking for new tactics to achieve this goal.
1 Ian O’Flynn, Deliberative Democracy (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022).
Ken Godfrey is the Executive Director of the European Partnership for Democracy.
This article is from the European Democracy Hub initiative led through Carnegie Europe and the European Democracy Association.
The task “Exploring global democratic innovations” supported by Robert Bosch Stiftung.
In a crowded, chaotic and contested global and concept market, the Carnegie Endowment provides policymakers with a comprehensive, independent strategic vision and cutting-edge concepts that promote foreign peace.
© 2022 All rights reserved
By this website, you accept our cookie policy.
You leave the Carnegie-Tsinghua Center for Global Policy and move on to some other Carnegie global site.
你将离开清华—卡内基中心网站，进入卡内基其他全球中心的网站。