Participatory Design and Planning

Participatory Democracy

The essence of democracy itself is now widely taken to be deliberation, as opposed to voting, interest aggregation, constitutional rights, or even self-government. The deliberative turn represents a renewed concern with the authenticity of democracy, which is engaged in by competent citizens. To increase the effectiveness of our democracy, Tom Atlee advances the idea of citizen deliberative councils (CDC), which are small face-to-face groups of diverse citizens that convene for short periods of time to consider some public concern. Deliberation is a form of dialogue with the intention of producing decisions, policies, recommendations, or collective action. Deliberation involves a careful consideration of an issue, examining the facts, viewpoints, and consequences related to it. Unlike an open participatory forum, a CDC is an organized group of people selected such that their collective diversity reflects the diversity of the larger population from which they were drawn. Unlike public hearings, which are often aimed at airing views, citizen deliberative councils are small, usually between 10 and 50 people, and generate a specific product such as a recommendation, which would generate further community dialogue. Specific methods using a deliberative approach include citizens’ juries, planning cells, deliberative polling, consensus conferences, and citizens’ panels. Individual methods may differ with respect to participant selection, the number of participants, the type of input obtained, or the number of meetings. Common to all, however, is the deliberative component whereby participants are provided with information about the issue being considered and encouraged to discuss and challenge the information and consider each others’ views before making a final decision or recommendation for action.

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