An honour, an adventure, and the most humbling experience: Facilitating democratic deliberation

Facilitating citizen deliberations is an honour, an adventure and the most humbling of experiences. In this role, we meet people who have never been asked to be involved in government decision-making, who live very different lives from each other (city, country, wealthy, more vulnerable). We have had people who contribute whilst on dialysis (online) or while receiving ongoing chemotherapy. We have had people return from overseas holidays to contribute to the last day of a deliberation. We even had a participant call in ideas from the birthing suite while their wife was having a baby! The level of interest, commitment and passion of everyday, diverse people enjoying the idea of contributing to something that is bigger than just them – has always astounded us!

We have also seen some incredible outputs from processes like these where the deliberators have pushed the boundaries, identified new, innovative ideas or even just strongly affirmed a current direction. All of these outputs have helped the auspicing organisations find a strength in their future direction that they might otherwise have struggled with.

We decided to write the book that we wish we had back in 2014 when we embarked upon this work. Much has been written about democratic deliberation, but very little has been written about facilitation. There are usually brief sections within larger manuals that reference the importance of facilitation, but rarely are these written from the perspective of facilitators themselves. In writing this book, we seek to make facilitation visible and bring the practice at the centre of our conversations about deliberative democracy alive.

Two years and 257 pages later

At the time of writing the book, Facilitating Public Deliberation – A Practical Guide, we had facilitated 39 long- and short-form deliberations. Over nine years, we had developed a range of facilitation methods – from ‘tried and tested’ to ‘new and emerging’. We knew we needed to capture our insights sooner rather than later. After all, sharing knowledge underpins everything we do. We publish numerous reference materials on our website, provide free webinars with insights from our work, present at conferences, give away materials to our clients to help them with their processes and also contribute to the Democracy R&D group where we share our insights and learn alongside academics and practitioners around the world. Taking the book journey seemed a natural progression from what we already do.

Our approach in writing the book was to write only about the principles we follow and the methods we use. We decided to place our experiences at the centre of writing the book, instead of referring to or comparing what our colleagues from the sector do, because we knew that would be a massive task. There are many different approaches out there, and most of them are not written down, so it would have been a huge research undertaking. Also, not everyone might be willing to share their approaches with others; we knew we wanted to just get this down, if only for our own sake. What is presented in the book, therefore, is one perspective – our perspective – on deliberative facilitation.

We learn when we make mistakes

The perspective we offer begins with the premise that the best learning comes from the things that go wrong.

There are so many things that can go wrong when facilitating deliberation. One example of a risk can be the auspicing organisation ‘wobbling’ part way through the process. This ‘wobble’ could lead to them sabotaging or even abandoning the process part way through, which would entail a big cost in reputation, let alone wasted resources. Another example of ‘what can go wrong’ is when the deliberating group is cynical and untrusting of the process from the start (often influenced by the type of recruitment undertaken) and therefore the ‘normal work’ of the group takes longer and the time to make recommendations is severely constrained at the ‘pointy’ end of the process. These sorts of problems and how we get around them were the basis for the book and, in particular, the sections on ‘lessons learnt’.

Aside from grounding the book in our experiences, we also give our readers a sense of our approach in deliberation. We have a flexible and ‘facilitatory’ style, where we give citizens the scope to develop their own ways of working, and to develop and agree on their own recommendations from scratch. This, from our understanding, is quite different from other approaches. Some facilitation styles construct deliberative events as formal gatherings using standard meeting procedures, and recommendations are developed by external parties such as the commissioning authority or steering committees rather than by the group itself.

By offering our perspective in the book, we invite others to share their own perspectives and thinking behind open issues in facilitation. We are constantly challenging ourselves and seeking to learn, and we hope others will respond to our ideas and join in our call to collectively improve the practice of facilitating deliberation.

Three wishes for deliberative democracy

As we launch a ‘big book’ on facilitating deliberation, we started reflecting on where deliberative democracy is headed. We have three wishes.

First, our greatest wish is for inclusive, citizen deliberation to be embedded in the way governance is discussed, planned and applied. This would mean seeing randomly selected groups of people involved in school councils, businesses, community groups and, of course, through government activities. Ideally, we would see a standing group of randomly selected people involved in policy setting and implementation at all levels of government.

I love the citizens’ jury, but I am also interested in the citizens’ army.

Second, outside of this long-term aspiration, we also wish to widen the reach of the work we do in citizen engagement. This includes a greater level of ‘storytelling’ or sharing of the work of minipublics in order to more actively engage the broader community. As one of our clients once said, “I love the citizens’ jury, but I am also interested in the citizens’ army.” Whether the broader community is an ‘army’ or not, the sentiment is clear: finding a way to engage with the broader public about the many amazing decisions happening around local areas is important to the longevity and gravitas of this work.

Finally, on a practical note, we are keen to explore ways of reducing the cost of deliberations. A big part of the cost of quality deliberations is in recruitment. We have been exploring ways this could be streamlined, such as having the electoral commission take responsibility for recruitment. We have also started thinking about ways of adequately resourcing deliberative minipublics, as in the case of building a Democracy Action Fund advanced by MASS LBP.

Shifting from facilitating everyday workshops to a deliberative democracy process (like a citizens’ jury or assembly) is like shifting from driving a car to the shops to driving Formula One! Both are complex and can be learned skills, but the outcome and risks are elevated in the latter.

It’s a ride we enjoy taking every single time!

About the Authors