DELIBERATIVE DEMOCRACY

Discussion Paper

Deliberative Democracy

Introduction

Deliberative democracy research has taken an empirical turn. Much of this research takes its perspective from within government looking outward toward the public, while minimizing the role of civil society (Dryzek, 2000). This is the case even though the theoretical literature leaves little doubt of the broader importance of civil society (Cohen & Arato, 1992). This paper flips this perspective and looks outward from civil society toward government to understand the civil society side of deliberative democracy.

This article demonstrates that social change organizations use both discursive and coercive forms of power to confront hegemonic power in the deliberative system. They apply powerful discursive strategies to shift both democratic procedure and substantive policy to address their claims for justice. I identified two types of discursive strategies: those that mobilize meaning in persuasive ways, and those that impose meaning in more coercive ways (Fung, Wright, 2003). The EJ Working Group sparingly used coercive power - such as threatening to exit the deliberative process - to ensure a more equal democratic procedure and to focus attention on substantive justice (Fischer, 2006). However, when their ideas about racial justice were weakened - for example, in policy instruments collaboratively designed in deliberations, the EJWorking Group used non-confrontational discursive power outside forums. In one case, they developed critical discourse and disseminated it in the public sphere to inform future political action (Fraser, 1992).

DEAD (Decide, Educate, Announce and Defend)

Over the past decade, state and local governments throughout Australia have focused on how to improve community consultation. Government consultation processes, regulated with the best of intentions to involve the public, have come under heavy criticism as being DEAD (Decide, Educate, Announce and Defend). It has become apparent that the problem community consultation was supposed to fix - including the voice of the community in developing policy and plans - has remained problematic. Worse, the fix has often backfired. Rather than achieving community engagement, consultation has frequently resulted in the unintended consequence of community frustration and anger at tokenism and increased citizen disaffection. Traditional community consultation has become a “fix that failed”, resulting in a “vicious cycle” of ever-decreasing social capital1 (Hartz-Karp 2002). Ordinary citizens are less and less interested in participating, evidenced by the generally low turn-out at government community consultation initiatives. When the community does attend in larger numbers, it is most often because the issue has already sparked community outrage, inspiring those with local interests to attend and protest.

In their endeavour to change this situation, government agencies have created and disseminated 'how to' community consultation manuals, conducted conferences and run training sessions for staff. Issues of focus have included project planning, risk analysis, stakeholder mapping, economic analysis, value assurance, standardisation and so forth. Implementation models have illustrated a desired shift from informing, educating and gaining input from citizens, to collaboration, empowerment and delegated decision-making. Although new engagement techniques have been outlined, it has not been clarified how agencies can achieve such a radical change from eliciting community input to collaborative ...