Page 82 - Enabling National Initiatives to Take Democracy Beyond Elections

80 A Project of the UN Democracy Fund (UNDEF) 2 Geography Rural communities and urban communities most obviously require different processes for reaching community decisions. City-based projects heavily benefit from ease-of-access to venues. This means that participants can reliably take the time to travel to a venue. Comparatively, rural communities may be disparate and require many hour-long drives to reach a suitably central venue for in- person deliberation. These two dramatically different experiences might mean that rural deliberations run on back-to-back days to accommodate for the heavy time-investment travelling to and from (and may require additional funding for overnight accommodation for some participants). While urban or suburban communities can have more regular but spread out in-person meetings. This also reveals a dynamic where-by people have different relationships to others in their community. People in the city often do not know each other while members of small communities have more local exposure when participating in a public process. 3 Resources The size and capacity of your project will be shaped by the resources available. Larger projects are, unsurprisingly, more expensive. However, there are other resource restrictions that might make long form deliberative projects not possible, including: • access to skilled facilitation; • expert input; • the ability to get a diversity of people in the room for deliberation. The resource constraints will mean that you will have to choose a method for community input that suits your resource availability.