Survey on Citizen Discussion-Participation-Decisionmaking Processes

Lisa Heft lisaheft at openingspace.net
Thu Feb 3 14:55:36 PST 2005


Hello, folks – I received this from a colleague on the research team
listed here and thought I’d pass it on to you.  If you have any
questions please do not reply to me but to the individuals listed below.
Thanks, Lisa Heft
 
***
 
Dear colleagues,
 
We are writing to ask for your help. LogoLink and the Participation
Group at IDS are working with our US partner, the Deliberative Democracy
Consortium (DDC), on an international project on mapping deliberative
and participatory processes in policy making. The DDC is a network of
practitioners, researchers and policy makers working to renew democracy
through strengthening citizen participation and deliberation.
 
In this project, we are working together to try to get a better
understanding of the thousands of examples around the world in which
citizens are involved through discussion and participation in
decision-making processes.  We invite your participation in this
exercise, and hope you will take about 15-20 minutes to complete the
survey, as well as to send it on to others in your network.
 
Background
 
A widely recognized gap in the field of deliberative democracy is the
lack of a synthesis of the context, purposes, design and institutional
connection of a range of experiments in deliberation‹decision-making
through discussion‹that are currently employed around the world.  The
Mapping Project will seek to collect a broad sample of
initiatives‹including living traditions like the kgotla in Southern
Africa or panchayat in India to modern community forums like a Citizens¹
Jury or the Brazilian Participatory Budget‹that demonstrate the
following characteristics:
 
-- Inclusion: seek the participation of a broad, representative sample
of the public in an inclusive manner, in some instances making special
efforts to include politically under-represented groups.
 
-- Discussion: engage community members in discussion, with one another,
perhaps with experts, and often with decision-makers prior to generating
advice or recommendations to government.
 
-- Impact: attempt to influence real-world decision-making around a
range of outcomes that can include budget, planning, policy or
administrative procedures (such as regulation) at some level of
government (i.e. local, state, national, etc).
 
Working with a grant from the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, a small
team of international scholar-practitioners, will address this gap by
conducting a scan of the worldwide field of practice. The mapping
exercise will seek to draw upon existing mapping efforts and will pay
particular attention to regions that may be underrepresented in the
existing literature and research networks.  This mapping exercise will
produce several outcomes, among them:
 
1) A written report of findings that includes a typology of methods used
around the world
 
2) An online database for the sharing of information about these
practices, that will be publicly available.
 
The mapping effort will support the advance of deliberative democracy in
the following ways:
 
1) Promote networking among practitioners and researchers in various
parts of the globe;
 
2) Generate an interesting snapshot of the state of practice around the
world;
 
3) Establish a useful starting point for further research.
 
Research team members are: Lyn Carson, School of Economics and Political
Science, The University of Sydney (Australia); Jan Elliott, Senior
Associate, Public Policy Forum (Canada); John Gaventa, Fellow, Institute
for Development Studies, University of Sussex (United Kingdom); Leane
Nurse, Program Analyst, US EPA National Center for Environmental
Innovation (United States); Lars Hasselblad Torres, Researcher,
AmericaSpeaks (United States).
 
Instructions
 
You can complete the survey online at, 
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=27135485798
 
Please complete the survey by February 28, 2005.  
If you will use the online survey, please note that you may exit at any
time and your results will be saved but you must return to the survey
using the same computer IP address.
 
If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact our Paola
Brambilla (P.Brambilla at ids.ac.uk). Please feel free to pass this survey
along to colleagues whom you know who are also working in this field.
 
Again, our sincere thanks for your consideration and for your
participation. We look forward to sharing the results!
 
Very warm regards,
 
 
John Gaventa and Paola Brambilla
 
 

*
*
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