Page 62 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

60 A Project of the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) Involving the community in public decisions can take many different forms. This handbook specifically takes a good, better, best approach. The principles should help you tweak what you do today and also suggests completely new formats you may not have seen before. Not everything needs to use a long deliberation. There are many different circumstances where these types of project are not suitable. This is usually when the key principles (Pg. 38-39) would need to be severely compromised to make the project possible. In these situations, you can make other forms of community engagement more deliberative to achieve a better form of citizen involvement. The goal with making surveys and town- hall meetings more deliberative is to channel the productive insight of the community in a way that is useful for you as a decision maker. Surveys are familiar to staff but not always useful. You can have quick successes by making small changes to your approach. By including the community in a problem sharing and problem-solving capacity you change the public conversation away from heated discussions toward finding common ground solutions based on an informed position.