Democracy: doing it for ourselves
On 15 November, we were invited to Nesta to speak on whether citizens' assemblies can pave the way for the future of democracy. With polarization and national populism on the rise, countries around the world are experimenting with citizens’ assemblies.
Our Iswe Knowledge and Practice lead Claire Mellier spoke as an expert practitioner, facilitator of assemblies, and thought leader on the subject. Claire was joined by Nicholas Gruen, CEO of Lateral Economics and visiting Professor at King’s College London, Martin Wolf, chief economics commentator at The Financial Times – whose recent column explored these possibilities, and the event was chaired by Nesta CEO Ravi Gurumurthy.
Gruen started with a brief history of Western democracy and its setbacks. He argued that citizens’ assemblies will remain marginal if they remain one-off events commissioned by, and then reporting back to governments. What followed was a conversation between the speakers on how, and why we affect change, and the other systemic factors that need to take effect even if our wishes for a permanent assembly are granted.
Watch in full, or read a summary of the discussion below.
Ravi Gurumurthy: “While many problems feel intractable and difficult, there are policy solutions. But what is difficult is the politics. And even the second or third-best policy idea is difficult, politically. And this is the context for this conversation. Because if we are to try and meet the scale of the challenges faced in the country with ambitious policies, we have to find ways of forging agreements on quite radical ideas, not lowest common denominator politics.”
Claire Mellier: “There's Pew research that shows that people want radical political system change. So it's not just us - the usual suspects who are interested in politics - that are asking for change. And it's not just the social movements. There are a wide range of methods which are at the heart of these processes, and they’re happening now. The key components in citizens assemblies are sortition, the selection of people at random, but also deliberation.
The OECD are calling this the deliberative wave, but we think actually, there's a lot more than the OECD acknowledges. In the UK, for instance, during the Blair and Brown governments, more than 200 deliberative processes were happening.
At Iswe we've been supporting processes in Armenia, for instance, which I think speaks to your point about doing democracies, democracy ourselves. There's been an assumption for the past 10 or 20 years that to have legitimacy, these processes need a mandate from power holders. And if you get a mandate that a process will be designed that will lead to change. What we're noticing, and I've been involved in more than 20 assemblies in the last few years, is that actually, that's a bit simplistic and naive to assume that mandate and a good process lead to change. Politics is messy.
And we've seen that with the French Citizens Convention for Climate for instance. There was a commitment from President Macron to not filter what was coming out of the assembly, and that this would be either translated into a referendum regulation or legislation. But that wasn’t the case. We know how politics works. It's messy, they have a vested interest. And we need to acknowledge that when we're talking about deliberative democracy.
It's not just good enough to do a robust process, you need to think about how change happens. Where are these recommendations landing, and do they land in a system that is not suited for actual radical change?
So when you think about the deliberative system, then you need to think about the different components in that system. And the citizens’ assembly is a mechanism. But you need to think about what are the narratives and culture. How does that shape it? What is the role of the media? How is that going to influence what happens once you've got the recommendations? Where are the vested interests? And at which point are they going to influence the process between the recommendation and the legislation? We need to become power literate. We need to do democracy ourselves, we need to reclaim it, and not put all our hopes into existing power holders.
When I was facilitating these assemblies, people were activated. That sense of, you know, individual and collective agency being created. And then they realize the change that we really believe is needed is not happening. So that is the risk. And the biggest risk I'm seeing at the moment is that it creates disempowerment and disillusionment because the change is not happening.
For me, this idea of doing it ourselves is actually really empowering. But that requires thinking carefully about how you make that change happen. So it's not just about creating the process. And that's what's so interesting, for instance, with this project in Armenia, called the Convention of the Future Armenian, which is a highly complex political context with war happening in Azerbaijan, a genocide literally another one happening on our doorsteps. And they have created a completely independent citizens Convention, which has its own affiliation network. This will take some of the recommendations forward, which includes people from civil society businesses, so they're not putting their hopes into the existing power holders. Let's think about system change, and how we're going to change systems collectively.
“Let's build on the assemblies, make them into an institution, and make it legitimate to such a degree that people have to give it part, which to some extent happened with the House of Commons in over 100 years. But that change will probably be a century or so. Which is why we come back to revolution…”
Martin Wolf: “So I started writing in 2016, a book which was published in February called The Crisis of Democratic Capitalism. Basically, it came out of my view, which is not something I would have thought 10 or 20 years earlier, that our political-economic system isn't working very well. And I'm putting this quite gently. And to me, it seems clear that some form of capitalism is going to survive, but I'm not at all clear that any sort of democracy isn’t.
And that's not something I had expected. It was triggered by the obvious disaster that was Brexit - not just economically, but politically. It has reinforced a form of politics, which cannot possibly deal with any of our problems. And I don't think anybody who's looked at the last seven years can really disagree with that. And of course, In America, they're about to elect a fascist. It's as simple as that. And it's a very open question, in my view, not very open, whether America in its current form of democracy will survive. So this is a major crisis of our system.”
We designed a system 40, 50 years ago which very broadly could be defined as welfare capitalism. And that's broken down. In essence, the argument of the book very, very crudely, is what do you do now? Well, one approach, which I talked to at length is to try and reform politics, reform the economy in such a way through the political process, that it works better for everybody. The other way to think about it is you need to reform politics, you probably need to reform both, and they have to come together. And it's in that context that I came to Nicholas's idea, and had only two or three pages actually, on why citizens had assemblies and particularly creating a separate House of Parliament selected by lot might be a really interesting idea and might do some useful things to remedy the problems we have.
But the big point that Claire raised is how do you make this or anything like it happen? Which is, of course, also the good, big good critique of my own book, I wrote a critique of my own book, and we basically say, but how is any of this going to happen? And the answer is what Claire is suggesting, in a very nice and gentle way, is a revolution.
Let's build on the assemblies, make them into an institution, and make it legitimate to such a degree that people have to give it part, which to some extent happened with the House of Commons in over 100 years. But that change will probably be a century or so. Which is why we come back to revolution…”
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