Futures Forum: Barcelona’s Experiment in Radical Democracy
And Ireland too:
Futures Forum: Brexit: and how the Irish referendum's "deliberative democracy" countered fake facts
The UK government is saying it'd like to something too:
Government outlines vision to empower and invest in society - GOV.UK
As reported in the LocalGov website:
Whitehall to give communities ‘more direct role’ in decision-making
William Eichler 09 August 2018
The Government has launched a new strategy aimed at giving communities a more direct role in decisions that affect their local areas. The new Civil Society Strategy, the first in 15 years, is designed to help businesses, charities and the public sector work together more effectively.Tracey Crouch, the minister for sport and civil society, said the strategy places communities at the centre of the decision-making process. Unveiling what was billed as a complement to Whitehall’s Industrial Strategy, Ms. Crouch said the Civil Society Strategy focuses on five key foundations of social value: people, places and the public, private and social sectors.
It includes the unlocking of £20m from inactive charitable trusts to support community organisations over the next two years. It also sets out plans to establish of an independent organisation that will distribute £90m from dormant bank accounts to get disadvantaged young people into employment. Another independent organisation will be set up to use £55m from dormant bank accounts to tackle financial exclusion and the problem of access to affordable credit.
The Government will also launch an ‘Innovation in Democracy’ pilot scheme in six regions across the country, which could include Citizens’ Juries or mass participation in decision-making on community issues via an online poll or app.
‘Civil society is the bedrock of our communities. It is made up of the volunteers, youth workers, charities and innovative businesses that work to improve lives and make areas better for all,’ said Ms. Crouch. ‘Our strategy builds on this spirit of common good to help create a country that works for everyone. I want people, organisations and businesses to feel inspired to get involved and make a difference. Through collaboration, we will unlock the huge potential of this incredible sector, help it grow, support the next generation and create a fairer society.’
Whitehall to give communities more direct role in decision making - LocalGov.co.uk - Your authority on UK local government
Civil Society is indeed a bedrock of UK life - and needs nurturing:
Futures Forum: Civil society under threat
Futures Forum: Civil society under attack?
The question is whether the new proposals by central government will do the trick - and really give locals a 'more direct role in decision making'.
The East Devon Watch Blog is highly sceptical of the government's proposals:
“GOVERNMENT TO TRIAL CITIZENS JURIES AND MASS ONLINE POLLS IN LOCAL DECISION-MAKING”
9 AUG 2018
Owl says: as with all these ideas, proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Remember, we are less than a year away from local elections and promises will be poured out until they are over!
And, maybe, it’s just a way of forcing us to make rationing decisions and deflecting responsibility from government policies leading to rationing in the first place...
“Government to trial citizens juries and mass online polls in local decision-making” | East Devon Watch
The Guardian is even more scathing:
The Guardian view on the Tories and civil society: a pattern of denial
Editorial
At local level Conservatives can see the harm wrought by austerity, but that insight has not reached the party’s upper echelons
Wed 8 Aug 2018 22.30 BST
At local level Conservatives can see the harm wrought by austerity, but that insight has not reached the party’s upper echelons
Wed 8 Aug 2018 22.30 BST
Last modified on Thu 9 Aug 2018 18.20 BST
Northamptonshire county council alone faces a deficit of £70m this year. ‘Tory MPs and councillors are increasingly raising the alarm over what is happening at local level.’ Photograph: Joe Giddens/PA
The Conservatives often seem unsure whether to present budget cuts as painful but necessary or painless and desirable. Tory ideologues see state spending as inimical to enterprise and corrosive of personal freedom, but pragmatists recognise that public service users do not feel austerity as a kind of liberation.
To reconcile the two positions, David Cameron invented the “big society” – the idea that voluntary work could fill gaps in government provision of services. But piecemeal good work done under the “big society” banner could never soften blows from the chancellor’s axe.
Still, the Conservatives have not abandoned the idea that voluntarism can repair the social fabric. On Thursday, the government launches its civil society strategy, presented as a reform to harness the resources of public, private and charitable sectors alike to the goal of “building a fairer society for all”. It is strikingly reminiscent of the big society, although the culture department overlooks the comparison when declaring its new programme to be the first exercise of its kind in 15 years.
Modest sums of money are involved – £165m divided between various projects. To put that in perspective, Northamptonshire county council alone faces a deficit of £70m this year. The combined shortfall in funding for English county councils is around £6bn. To stave off bankruptcy, local authorities face limiting themselves to the provision of skeleton services.
The Conservatives often seem unsure whether to present budget cuts as painful but necessary or painless and desirable. Tory ideologues see state spending as inimical to enterprise and corrosive of personal freedom, but pragmatists recognise that public service users do not feel austerity as a kind of liberation.
To reconcile the two positions, David Cameron invented the “big society” – the idea that voluntary work could fill gaps in government provision of services. But piecemeal good work done under the “big society” banner could never soften blows from the chancellor’s axe.
Still, the Conservatives have not abandoned the idea that voluntarism can repair the social fabric. On Thursday, the government launches its civil society strategy, presented as a reform to harness the resources of public, private and charitable sectors alike to the goal of “building a fairer society for all”. It is strikingly reminiscent of the big society, although the culture department overlooks the comparison when declaring its new programme to be the first exercise of its kind in 15 years.
Modest sums of money are involved – £165m divided between various projects. To put that in perspective, Northamptonshire county council alone faces a deficit of £70m this year. The combined shortfall in funding for English county councils is around £6bn. To stave off bankruptcy, local authorities face limiting themselves to the provision of skeleton services.
That presages a hollowing out of local communities on a scale that the government’s new strategy cannot begin to address. Even the new spending is illusory. The bulk of it comes from “dormant bank and building society accounts”, which is a Whitehall euphemism for money to be found down the back of a sofa. (Past beneficiaries from this accounting wheeze include Big Society Capital, the fund set up to support Mr Cameron’s pet project.)
The ambition of nurturing civil society is laudable and the argument that charities and community groups often know better how to meet local needs than central state bodies is also valid. But for such a mechanism to be effective there must be partnership and balance between state and non-state providers. That is hard to achieve when the main thrust of national policy is to withdraw resources from local government.
In some areas, notably the NHS, ministers grasp that cuts have reached the limit of what is politically sustainable. Tory MPs and councillors are increasingly raising the alarm over what is happening at local level. The penny has dropped: services suffer when starved of money; people suffer when services waste away and those people express their anger and frustration in the polling booth.
That insight does not yet appear to have spread very far through the upper echelons of the party. There is something sad and ridiculous in the launch of a “civil society strategy” imagining new institutions to support local communities, when the existing political structures, the democratically mandated authorities that have always fulfilled that purpose, are collapsing in a fiscal famine imposed with ideological motive by central government.
The Guardian view on the Tories and civil society: a pattern of denial | Editorial | Opinion | The Guardian
Perhaps we need a real dose of 'deliberative' or 'participatory' democracy:
Contempt for the voters undermines democracy | Financial Times
Deliberative democracy must rise to the threat of populist rhetoric - The Conversation
Yes, Ordinary Citizens Can Decide Complex Issues - WSJ
It's time for the participatory society | openDemocracy
Ireland must listen to Citizens’ Assembly on climate change - Irish Times
EUROPP – We need to talk (more) about deliberative democracy in the EU
Korea experiments with deliberative democracy - Korea Herald
The Jacobin would would add the notion of choosing politicians by lot:
Beyond Electoral Democracy
BY TOM MALLESON
The radical democracy of the future requires more than just elections. We need a legislature by lot.
Democracy by Lot
If you lived in any previous historical era and told your neighbor that you believed in democracy, they would have understood what you meant. Yet if you had said that you believed in democracy and elections, they would have thought you’d lost your marbles.
For more than two thousand years, it was common knowledge that the only people who wanted elections were the rich and the powerful, since they were the ones who invariably benefitted from them. Those who genuinely believed in democracy, on the other hand, believed that political power must be kept in the hands of regular people and typically advocated the selecting of political positions by lot.
For us moderns, the idea of essentially drawing names out of a hat to fill important political offices seems naïve at best, dangerous at worst. Yet such a conclusion is far too hasty. The whole point of a lottery is that it purposefully introduces what political scientists call a “blind break” into decision-making procedures. The fact that lotteries are based on randomness does not make them irrational. Quite the contrary: it makes them a useful and often supremely rational tool for those areas of social life where you want the impartiality, balance, and fairness that randomness generates.
Today the idea of choosing politicians by lot is making a comeback because of two developments. First, the mathematical innovation of the representative sample — the idea that if you randomly sample a large population you can create a “mini-public” that is a statistically representative, miniature version of the whole. And second, the emergence of what theorists call deliberative democracy — particularly the notion that regular people can make good, competent, political decisions if (and this is a big if) they are immersed in a well-designed deliberative context: a space with equal participation, access to pertinent information, skillful moderation, small group discussion, and the absence of all types of coercion and force except that which the preeminent philosopher Jürgen Habermas called the “unforced force of the better argument.”
If we combine the modern mathematical notion of a representative mini-public with the new insights about the democratic potential of deliberation, what we get is a political epiphany: a novel kind of democratic mechanism that provides us with something that elections never can — a clear indication of what the considered judgement of the entire adult population would be if they were able to deliberate on issues thoroughly, freely, and in an informed manner.
Recent years have witnessed a remarkable explosion of interest in the use of random selection to solve political problems. A number of social movements have advocated random selection, such as the 15-M movement in Spain, Syntagma square in Greece, Nuit debout in France, and the G1000 in Belgium. Progressive parties like Podemos have begun introducing random selection into their internal procedures. Perhaps most importantly, random selection has started to appear in formal political settings, such as the Citizens’ Initiative Review in Oregon, the Icelandic constitutional reform, the Citizens’ Assemblies in Canada, and the Irish Constitutional Convention, which resulted in the legalization of gay marriage.
We now have a wealth of practical knowledge about the efficacy of random selection, spanning more than three decades, from the pioneering work of Ned Crosby’s Citizens Juries to Lyn Carson’s new Democracy Foundation to Jim Fishkin’s Deliberative Polling. While the details vary, the experiments all point to the real potential for regular people to deliberate well and arrive at reasoned judgements.
Probably the most well-known experiment is that of the Citizens’ Assemblies — two in Canada and one in the Netherlands — which were established to consider the possibility of electoral reform.
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