Page 155 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

There are a number of ways of including them meaningfully in the process. This ranges from deep participation in a Stakeholder Reference Group where they will get an understanding of all parts of the project and see that the design is fair and the recommendations are clearly in the citizens’ hands; to simple attendance at a single briefing to understand how they can be heard. Remember, the decision on how much to involve these active voices is simply informed by the goal “how can we reach a trusted decision?”. If there is low trust, then these active voices will need to be more involved in order to trust the result. Broadly, their contributions will fall in the following categories: • Appearing as a speaker to give a perspective/ expert view. • Offering a written answer or response to the question the jury are going to answer. • Recommending other sources to read or speakers to hear from. • Attending as Observers to satisfy themselves (and tell others!) that the process was fair. You can involve stakeholders in your broader community engagement. There is much more room for their involvement in town-hall meetings. This could range from a conversational role on stage to their help in fielding specific questions on their related issues. Many traditional formats can draw on deliberative principles (in this case, diversity of information). It is important that stakeholders have a genuine opportunity (often through multiple formats) to make their case to the public, and in order to accommodate the participation of stakeholders, you should use a number of approaches to integrate them into deliberations. Here are a few examples: As a minimum, an early briefing for stakeholders is worthwhile, to enable them to understand how the process will work, check for biases and any objections, and to ensure their participation is appropriately scoped. It is also a helpful (and common) practice to have stakeholders on a “Steering Group” to satisfy themselves (and the media and the public) first-hand that the deliberations are not stacked against them. 153