How and why deliberative democracy enables co-intelligence and brings wisdom to governance

Over the past decade, state and local governments throughout Australia have focused on how to improve community consultation. Government consultation processes, regulated with the best of intentions to involve the public, have come under heavy criticism as being DEAD (Decide, Educate, Announce and Defend). It has become apparent that the problem community consultation was supposed to fix – including the voice of the community in developing policy and plans – has remained problematic. Worse, the fix has often backfired. Rather than achieving community engagement, consultation has frequently resulted in the unintended consequence of community frustration and anger at tokenism and increased citizen disaffection. Traditional community consultation has become a “fix that failed”, resulting in a “vicious cycle” of ever-decreasing social capital1 (Hartz-Karp 2002). Ordinary citizens are less and less interested in participating, evidenced by the generally low turn-out at government community consultation initiatives. When the community does attend in larger numbers, it is most often because the issue has already sparked community outrage, inspiring those with local interests to attend and protest. In their endeavour to change this situation, government agencies have created and disseminated ‘how to’ community consultation manuals, conducted conferences and run training sessions for staff. Issues of focus have included project planning, risk analysis, stakeholder mapping, economic analysis, value assurance, standardisation and so forth. Implementation models have illustrated a desired shift from informing, educating and gaining input from citizens, to collaboration, empowerment and delegated decision-making. Although new engagement techniques have been outlined, it has not been clarified how agencies can achieve such a radical change from eliciting community input to collaborative decision-making. Regardless, to reassure the public that improvements have been made, community consultation has been ‘re-badged’ to ‘community engagement’. A new vocabulary has developed around this nomenclature. However, the community has remained unconvinced that anything much has changed. The question is: Why hasn’t the community accepted these efforts with enthusiasm? The most optimistic response is that there will be a lag time between the announcement of improvements and actual improvements, and an even longer time lag between seeing the results and a resumption of the community’s trust in government. The more pessimistic response (one that also has resonance with many public sector staff) is that in essence, not a lot has changed. The ‘re-badging’ and management improvements have not resulted in the public feeling more engaged or empowered

Collective Identity and Voice at the Australian Citizens' Parliament

This paper examines the role of collective identity and collective voice in political life. We argue that persons have an underlying predisposition to use collective dimensions, such as common identities and a public voice, in thinking and expressing themselves politically. This collective orientation, however, can be either fostered or weakened by citizens’ political experiences. Although the collective level is an important dimension in contemporary politics, conventional democratic practices do not foster it. Deliberative democracy is suggested as an environment that might allow more ground for citizens to express themselves not only in individual but also in collective terms. We examine this theoretical perspective through a case study of the Australian Citizens’ Parliament, in which transcripts are analyzed to determine the extent to which collective identities and common voice surfaced in actual discourse. We analyze the dynamics involved in the advent of collective dimensions in the deliberative process and highlight the factors—deliberation, nature of the discussion, and exceptional opportunity—that potentially facilitated the rise of group identities and common voice. In spite of the strong individualistic character of the Australian cultural identity, we nonetheless found evidence of collective identity and voice at the Citizens’ Parliament, expressed in terms of national, state, and community levels. In the conclusion, we discuss the implications of those findings for future research and practice of public deliberation

Sustainable Urban Systems: Co-design and Framing for Transformation

Rapid urbanisation generates risks and opportunities for sustainable development. Urban policy and decision makers are challenged by the complexity of cities as social–ecological–technical systems. Consequently there is an increasing need for collaborative knowledge development that supports a whole-of-system view, and transformational change at multiple scales. Such holistic urban approaches are rare in practice. A co-design process involving researchers, practitioners and other stakeholders, has progressed such an approach in the Australian context, aiming to also contribute to international knowledge development and sharing. This process has generated three outputs: (1) a shared framework to support more systematic knowledge development and use, (2) identification of barriers that create a gap between stated urban goals and actual practice, and (3) identification of strategic focal areas to address this gap. Developing integrated strategies at broader urban scales is seen as the most pressing need. The knowledge framework adopts a systems perspective that incorporates the many urban trade-offs and synergies revealed by a systems view. Broader implications are drawn for policy and decision makers, for researchers and for a shared forward agenda

Methods for sustainability: Conclusion

© Janette Hartz-Karp and Dora Marinova 2017. All rights reserved. Since both sustainability and methods are variably understood, the task of suggesting effective ways to best achieve a more sustainable world is a fraught undertaking. The concept of sustainability, regardless of definition, is extraordinary broad, covering geographies - local to global; sectors - environmental, socio-cultural and economic; small scale and large scale. Complicating this further, sustainability is inherently complex and inevitably unpredictable. Similarly, methods range from techniques and approaches to designing alternative worldviews. Given this cornucopia of dimensions, the selection of methods in this book is aimed at resolving key challenges. The methods can be universally applied and are forward-looking rather than reifying our existing modes of unsustainability. Accordingly, this methods book does not attempt to cover all bases. Instead it represents diverse beacons of light and hope in a broad array of possibilities. Each chapter in this book provides either cutting-edge verifiable methods, or poses different ways to think about, understand and achieve a more sustainable world. Considerable theory and practice also underpin the explanations of the methods. The section on making cities more liveable with a reduced carbon footprint includes chapters that are at the forefront of this body of knowledge. Presenting different worldviews of how more sustainable governance could be achieved, our section on governance is far from typical - embracing generic and specific, global and local. Similarly, the chapters on developing a more sustainable economic base suggest different ways for framing and implementing a new thinking, from broad and generic economic frameworks and methods, to local methods to achieve greater socio-economic sustainability. The final section on more sustainable livelihoods and living presents a small but diverse range of ways to improve lives, including ways to achieve behavioural and societal change. Each of these chapters aims to add to our knowledge of how we can rethink and proactively respond to sustainability challenges in ways that can significantly improve living together and into the future within the limits of our ecosystem

Deliberative Collaborative Governance Approaches to Sustainability Assessment

The Handbook of Sustainability Assessment introduces the theory and practice of sustainability assessment and showcases the state-of-the-art research