Over the past few months, committee member Finn Shewell has contributed two articles to the Public Sector Journal – one providing a high-level overview of the deliberative approaches available to the public sector, and one going deep into what a national-scale Citizens’ Assembly could look like for Aotearoa.
You can read both articles below, along with some clarifications and supplementary information that couldn’t make it in to the final article:
To provide some clarification regarding the second piece – by itself, it might give the impression that we haven’t yet done some awesome deliberative things in New Zealand – we absolutely have!
A good example is the one done for Toi te Taiao: the Bioethics Council on pre-birth testing. This included around 700 participants with 6 framing workshops, 18 deliberative workshops from Whangarei to Invercargill and 3 small group online deliberations based on the NIF method, and including Māori-only and Pacific-only framing and deliberative workshops. The 2007-08 process created significant opportunities for many people to deliberate in their local communities. It built on learnings from citizens assemblies and was one of the cases covered in a Policy Quarterly article by Trust Democracy’s former Chair, Simon Wright, Max Rashbrooke, the IDEA Institute and Tatjana Buklijas, Auckland University.
The Rise, Fall and Re-Rise Of Deliberative Democracy In New Zealand | Policy Quarterly
It’s also worth clarifying that the A F Thomas Park (that includes the Takapuna Golf Course) Deliberative Forum outcomes were more complex than than the wording “voted against all of it” towards the end of the article implies. The Kaipatiki Local Board made provision for many of the forum recommendations and offered clear reasons for those that weren’t able to be accommodated.
Deliberative process does not require recommendations to be accepted. It provides a high degree of influence to the panel but by necessity retains the final decision making at the governing body level. This is because under our current legislative arrangements, the elected Board (in this case) is the body with democratic legitimacy.
There can be information that comes to the governing body from other sources, or technical or financial constraints that limit the ability to accept recommendations in full. International figures provided by macro-studies of the OECD Deliberative Democracy Database suggest that public authorities accept or act on between 40-60% of recommendations in a partial, modified or intent-approved capacity. It should be noted that local or municipal bodies have higher rates of acceptance than national governments, perhaps because local issues tend to be less partisan.
More information about the A F Thomas Park Deliberative Forum can be found here
(scroll to the bottom of the page)