Deliberative citizen engagement involves integrating citizens’ voices more directly into the ongoing work of democratic governance.
Such practices can be embedded into public administration and used by public servants to improve local governance, service delivery, and community well-being. The NSW Government and the Office of Social Cohesion have commissioned a national Guidebook for Deliberative Engagement, developed by the Centre for Deliberative Democracy, to support agencies across Australia to design and run these processes well.
The primary focus of the Connecting to Parliament project is deliberative engagement in representative settings, where the aim is to strengthen connections between the voices of citizens and elected parliaments.
Deliberative democratic innovations go beyond more conventional reforms such as changes to electoral rules, improvements in voting accessibility, or even transparency measures. They tackle the deeper challenge of how citizens can exercise meaningful, ongoing influence over the policies that shape their lives.
Research shows that citizens don’t want to be limited to conventional participatory practices in representative settings, namely casting a vote every few years; they want more regular, meaningful opportunities for public participation in political decision-making.
Around the world, deliberative innovations from citizens’ assemblies to participatory budgeting have demonstrated the potential of deliberative citizen engagement to strengthen the capacity of everyday people to become involved in politics, build trust and confidence in parliaments, and make political decision-making and governance more accountable and responsive to the public.
Deliberative citizen engagement is often situated within the broader field of democratic innovations, a well-established body of scholarship and practice concerned with improving the ways in which citizens engage with political decision-making beyond the act of voting. Commonly grounded in the theory of deliberative democracy, democratic innovations emphasise a communicative, or ‘talk-centric’ approach to democracy, rather than relying primarily on the aggregation of votes to register public preferences. On this account, the legitimacy of a democratic system depends not only on periodic elections but also on the quality of public conversations that take place between them.
Democratic innovations create new opportunities for everyday citizens to shape public decisions through constructive and informed dialogue, both among citizens and between citizens and political actors.
What is Deliberative Citizen Engagement and why does it matter?
Meet the C2P Team
Collaborations