Page 116 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

114 A Project of the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) Step 4: Scale Or: How big is the decision? How many places do I need to go? Linked heavily to the number of participants is the scale of the consultation. Is this a local council decision or a state-wide decision? Decisions that cover broad geographic distances or areas that have acutely different experiences of a policy problem may warrant two (or more) separate processes. An example of this is a decision that was made on infrastructure across a state with a capital city, other towns and rural areas. There were two distinct juries, one Metropolitan and one Regional. Two different juries allowed the government to get informed recommendations that were heavily situated in their geographic contexts which goes to the ‘people like me’ criterion. National conversations will almost always include more than one group of participants. This is crucial to capturing the experiences and descriptiveness of the entire country. How many groups and where will depend on the problem and the way it is experienced differently across a state or country. Scale can be a way of diversifying the geographic voices in the room. This is important for large decisions but sometimes not necessary when the type of decision does not evoke experiences that would not heavily differ from one community to the next. This is not to say that all communities are the same, but that state-wide decisions on planning and energy may speak to different experiences and therefore require different types of scaling.