By Lukas Kübler, Giulia Molinengo, and Monika Arzberger
Deliberative democracy has emerged as both a vibrant school of thought and a set of real-world democratic innovations emphasising public participation that rests on mutual justification, inclusive communication and considered reflection. A decade ago, it would have been hard to foresee what the OECD has called a “deliberative wave” of experimentation and implementation across local, national and transnational levels. Examples range from the East Belgium permanent citizens’ dialogue, to national climate assemblies in over ten European nations and even more at local level, and the citizens’ panels and plenary of the EU Conference on the Future of Europe.
Especially when it comes to complex or wicked policy problems such as sustainability transformations, these deliberative “mini-publics” are seen as an antidote to the shortcomings of representative politics that too often fail to achieve the necessary broad social consensus and long-term commitments, constrained by electoral dynamics and partisan party and interest group politics.[1]
However, the expansion of mini-publics has been accompanied by frictions with the surrounding political and administrative institutions. These frictions arise from fundamental paradoxes between the logics of participatory deliberative processes and that of public governance, the way in which public authorities have long worked. If deliberative mini-publics are to leave the niches of what has been called ‘democratic innovation’ and become permanent features of democratic governance, public authorities will need to reconcile participatory and administrative concerns and integrate them within a logic of ‘collaborative governance’. Democratic innovation therefore needs to be accompanied by public sector innovation.
Just as democratic innovations have gained considerable momentum, some of their most influential advocates have questioned whether the deliberative wave is sustainable. David Farrell, one of the co-designers of the influential Irish Citizens’ Assembly, recently reflected on the rapid spread of citizens’ assemblies in Ireland. He warned: “Before steaming on with a series of new citizens’ assemblies, there is a need to reflect on “why we need them, how their outputs are dealt with, and how they are organised.” The problem of ‘uptake’ by public authorities needs particular attention: what happens with the results of a deliberative process, once they land on the desk of the commissioning public authority?
This problem does not only surface in Ireland. It is ubiquitous and threatens any sustained success of deliberative democratic innovation. The lack of uptake is not just an arbitrary shortcoming of public authorities, but a symptom of an underlying systemic problem. Just blaming public authorities and demanding they “try harder” accomplishes nothing. Instead, we argue, this issue needs to be understood as a symptom of a more fundamental clash between the logic of deliberative processes and the public governance paradigm public authorities rely on. While public authorities – for good reasons – work to principles of accountability, hierarchy and control, deliberative participation works according to a logic of flexibility, horizontality and openness typical of dialogue and communication.
The exploration and, where possible, the amelioration of these tensions is central to our work in the Collaborative Governance Lab at the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management. In Germany, an ambitious participation process has been established by law that will run alongside the decade-long search for an appropriate site for a deep geological repository to hold high-level radioactive waste. Our Office is the regulating authority for this search and, at the same time, is also responsible for implementing this participatory arrangement. It is this double role, and the challenges that it brings, that motivates our work.
We are witnessing a potentially significant transition in democratic innovations as they begin to transcend the level of local, one-off innovations and challenge the paradigms of our political and administrative systems. Transitions like this are typical for any innovation cycle. When innovations, technological or social, ‘breakthrough’, they move from social niches towards the centre of society, changing the way ‘things are being done”. No systemic change can happen without learning and adaptation of the system. In the case of deliberative democratic innovations, this means that administrative and political institutions will need to learn to work within a collaborative governance framework. The future of deliberative democratic innovation is, in other words, a matter of public sector innovation.
Let us unpack this argument a bit more. Public governance institutions often play a convening role in participatory processes, with the intent of rebuilding institutional trust, overcoming polarization and delivering better solutions to complex public problems. In doing so, public authorities create ‘invited’ deliberative spaces and thereby implicitly commit to the logic of deliberative participation. However, in practice, public governance institutions also need to squeeze the deliberative process into the confines of existing bureaucratic and administrative logics. Frictions emerge when other participants, including citizens, stakeholders and facilitators, see these restrictions as hindering the deliberative process and resist, or try to renegotiate, the arrangement. In such contexts, public authorities are paradoxically perceived (and to some extent act) as hindering deliberation, even if it is precisely them who are enabling deliberation in the first place as conveners of invited spaces.
Why does this happen? Public authorities do not have an easy life in this context, as they are asked to comply with divergent logics at the same time. On the one hand, the underlying logics of a deliberative process requires a public authority in its role as a convener to…
- … enable the process by making available resources, providing a suitable framework for a good deliberative process and inviting the relevant public and/or stakeholders. Often, public authorities are expected to offer participants and stakeholders a certain degree of influence on the process, for example, by including them in the co-design of the process.
- … give orientation to the public. Typically, the public authority holds some kind of decision power and/or specialised expertise in the relevant domain in which participants are to deliberate. Therefore, participants expect the public authority to provide orientation and professional expertise.
- … openly share its specialized expertise and to engage in open-ended discussion with all participants on an equal footing.
But on the other hand, administrative and bureaucratic logics require a public authority to…
- … be accountable and own the process and its potential outcomes. Public organizations are required to follow standardized administrative procedures when allocating public resources. They need to justify their actions to higher ranks, to auditing and monitory agencies, but also to the general public and the media. Therefore, they need to define from the very beginning why funds are being spent, how the process design furthers the official mandate and what the expected results will be.
- … control its specialized domain: While expressing an opinion can be perceived as harmless from a citizen’s perspective, public servants or politicians risk being misunderstood or taken out of context. Being publicly exposed in this way makes it challenging for public authorities to share their knowledge during the deliberative process.
- … speak with one voice: Public authorities are required to produce unified positions through internal agreement loops and discussions with higher ranks in the hierarchy. When they are invited to express a position with respect to a specific issue in a deliberative process, public servants sitting at the dialogue table are not necessarily empowered to make decisions and require more time than other actors to communicate their official position.
It is easy to see that public authorities dealing with these different logics find themselves confronted with interdependent and persistent contradictions. While the logic of deliberation (requirements 1-3) embodies principles of flexibility, horizontality and openness, public governance paradigms (requirements 4-6) embody principles of accountability, verticality and control. These tensions play out between the public authority and the public, but also often within the public authority as an organisation itself. For example, front-line staff will be pushed towards flexibility, openness and trust-building in negotiating and mediating the process design, but at the same time mid- or high-level leaders may insist on standardized procedures or financial accountability.
To prevent possible misunderstandings, we are not offering a hollow critique of bureaucracy and public administration. Public authorities need rules and hierarchy to deliver reliably the performance and services everyone expects of them. No one wants to live in a world where public authorities do not live up to their core bureaucratic requirements.
We are rather commenting on how a public authority that commits to delivering a deliberative process needs to acknowledge that it is entering a new terrain. It can neither treat deliberative innovation as a tick-box exercise nor throw away its bureaucratic principles. Instead, it needs to shape a path to actively navigate the paradoxes and challenges that are inherent to these two concurring logics, one of ‘collaborative governance’ where deliberative democratic innovation and public sector innovation go hand in hand. This requires intentional learning loops within the institution in which the conflicting requirements of administration and participation are negotiated, reconciled and hybrid arrangements deliberately constructed.
As a first step, a public authority needs to build internal structures and mechanisms that create room for its employees to collectively make sense of their new role as convener of deliberative processes, supporting the necessary cultural transformation within the institution. In our work at the Collaborative Governance Lab, for instance, we support “double loop” organizational learning within the institution to map potential conflicts that are inherent to the convener’s tasks and identify future avenues for action. We foster internal collaboration across silos and hierarchies. We engage in action research, embedding our experiences in academic discourse and learning from and exchanging with other practitioners in the field of public sector innovation, with the aim of embedding reflexivity.
Deliberative mini-publics still remain on the fringes of public governance. Even if some have been mandated by powerful and central actors within public governance, they have generally been commissioned as ad hoc experiments with vague commitments. But if deliberative mini-publics are seriously meant to leave the niches of democratic innovation and become a permanent feature of democratic governance, public authorities will need to reconcile participatory and administrative logics and integrate them within a logic of collaborative governance. This implies a fundamental shift in the mindset and culture of public governance institutions. If innovation in deliberative democracy and the public sector go hand in hand, participation and deliberation might become more than just the ambitions of radical democrats but indispensable elements of better public problem solving and co-creation of public value.
