Deliberative Democracy and Stakeholders, Understanding the Positions of Associative, Economic and Political Actors on a Deliberative Mini-Public

The increasing use of deliberative Mini-Publics in recent years has been controversially discussed by academics and practitioners with regard to questions of design and legitimacy. Less attention has however been paid to opinions of those actors who are directly impacted by Mini-Publics and who might have equally controversial positions. Although most Mini-Publics are only consultative, their perceived impact grows, and so does the number of concerned actors. While some scholars have examined the opinions of single types of actors on different forms of participation, this paper investigates systematically what positions associative, economic and political actors develop in parallel on a Mini-Public. The research is based on an in-depth case study of the Citizen Climate Parliament in the Province of Luxemburg, a Mini-Public with 33 citizens that was launched in 2015 by a Belgian province to work on its energetic neutrality. Following a mixed-method design, a diversified panel of 28 actors was selected for semi-structured interviews based on surveys conducted before and after the project. Through discourse analysis, four positions among the three types of actors were identified: an “elitist”, an “expert”, a “(re)connection” and a “reinvention” position. These are mutually non-exclusive and illustrate that Mini-Publics can make use of this complementarity to enhance their own legitimacy by integrating stakeholders and elites in some way into their works. Possibilities exist before a Mini-Public, i.e. when preparing its work, during a Mini-Public, i.e. when debating sensitive issues, or even after a Mini-Public, i.e. when implementing the results