Page 19 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

With its focus on deliberation and civic lottery, this handbook informs one aspect of addressing these problems. Long-form deliberations should be complemented with wide community engagement strategies that ensure many different people can be involved including groups who don’t normally have a say. As such, this is not a handbook documenting all public engagement. There are many great resources out there for community and public consultation and engagement, a long list of different tools, mechanisms and forums that you can make use of to hear from the community, each of which can be tailored to your needs. This handbook is instead a guide to delivering the large, extended time format Citizens’ Assembly process, and by applying the same principles to improving other different methods through the idea of deliberation. Deliberation is an approach to politics where citizens, not just experts or politicians, are deeply involved in community problem solving and public decision making. Making community engagement more deliberative means moving it away from adversarial or combative approaches to discussion and towards common ground solutions. This means that this book will reference a handful of different types of engagement regularly but not exhaustively – and often as a way of showing how different techniques can be used at different times and linked with one another. The theme of this handbook is that all manner of ways of involving the community in decision making can and should be made more deliberative. 17