When Digital Mass Participation Meets Citizen Deliberation: Combining Mini- and Maxi-Publics in Climate Policy-Making

Abstract

The upcoming vogue of climate assemblies and other forms of mini-publics are to give citizens a central role in climate policy-making and to break the political impasse. Yet climate mini-publics face challenges in political environments too, such as co-option, favoring expert opinions, and losing touch with the broader public. To remedy such pitfalls, recent papers have argued to combine synchronous deliberations of small groups of citizens with online participation procedures for the larger public. In this article, we report the results of a three-step combination model, where first a mini-public in the region of Súdwest-Fryslân (NL) was given a “carte blanche” to draft the content and the parameters of several related policy alternatives. Second, their proposals were fed into a digital participation tool to consult the wider public. Third, a citizens forum translated the outcomes of the maxi-public into policy recommendations, which were unanimously approved by the municipal council. In this paper, we report our findings of combining mini- and maxi-publics and how the actors involved evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of the combination of these two participatory approaches.

Stepping into the shoes of the policy maker: Results of a Participatory Value Evaluation for the Dutch long term COVID-19 strategy

“…Subsequently, citizens are asked which measures they would recommend to the government. PVE was also applied in the Netherlands at the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic to investigate citizens’ preferences for alleviating lockdown measures ( Mouter et al, 2021a ), and PVE was also deployed in other domains, such as the energy transition ( Itten and Mouter, 2022 ) and flood protection policies ( Mouter et al, 2021b ). To triangulate the results of the PVE, we conducted a second study in which citizens evaluated the same measures in the context of the four scenarios, but participants in this second study were asked to rate the acceptability of the measures on a five-point Likert scale.…”

Participatory Science Communication Through Consensus Conferences: Legitimacy Evaluations of a German Consensus Conference on Genome Editing

“…In line with such calls, various hybrid formats have already emerged (Delborne et al, 2011; Itten & Mouter, 2022; Kaplan et al, 2021). Such developments face multiple procedural challenges, however.…”

“…While such input and throughput experimentation seem certainly worthwhile, inclusiveness challenges are likely to remain (Itten & Mouter, 2022). This relates to inequalities in (technical) resource access but also, for example, in the capacity to tell one's story (Dryzek, 2000) or inherent inequalities in the production of (dominant) knowledge (Valkenburg, 2020).…”

“…As a result, we can find a “systemic turn” in deliberation research where scholars increasingly investigate how deliberative mini-publics should and can impact broader political systems (Rountree et al, 2022). Authors have proposed, for example, to tailor deliberation activities to windows of policy-making opportunity, in terms of topic (e.g., consideration of competing themes), timing (e.g., early stage engagement), and the involvement of DM (Burgess, 2014; Caluwaerts & Reuchamps, 2015; Delborne et al, 2013; Itten & Mouter, 2022; Kaplan et al, 2021; Rask & Worthington, 2012; Richter et al, 2022). Kaplan et al (2021) found that the outputs from their deliberative method “proved most valuable for decision-making when the project had a direct connection to a policy decision and when there were strong ‘process champions’” (p. 9).…”

Energy democracy: A digital future?

“…This is necessary for 'traditional' governance participation (e.g. committee service or trusteeship) and emerging 'eparticipation' tools [92,93]. In the energy sector, echoing patterns across the broader economy and recognized as part of distributional energy (in)justice [94], there is emerging evidence that gaps in digital skills are linked to other socio-geographic features such as age, socioeconomic status and geography, among others [95][96][97][98].…”