Representative Population Samples
= A mechanism designed to deliberate issues and recommend policy responses, also known variously as “mini publics” or citizens’ panels.
Description
Patrick Chalmers:
Representative population samples are similar in design to citizens’ juries, but mini publics typically tackle more complex issues, often at larger scale – national government, or even global issues – with outcomes that can be more impactful than advisory statements for voters.
While Brazil has cut back citizens’ involvement in participatory budgeting, another democratic innovation has made its debut in South America’s most populous country – the Conselho Cidadão or citizens’ council. The objective? To tackle solid waste management in the tropical northeastern coastal city of Fortaleza. A citizens’ collective, Delibera Brasil, coordinated various groups in the city prefecture to create a citizens’ council tasked to examine the city’s R$200m (US$37m) annual spend on garbage. This topic might not grab headlines, but the method has already produced some stand-out results around the world.
In Ireland, a de facto ban on abortion was lifted in 2019 after debate within a citizens’ assembly helped to break the deadlock among politicians. That initiative opened the way for a national referendum in which citizens voted two to one to drop the ban.
In Australia, a similar approach killed off the South Australian government’s proposal to expand a long-term storage facility for nuclear waste.
In South Korea, another citizens’ panel revived a stalled nuclear power project. Common to all these examples was the role of representative panels of citizens who acted as a catalyst for policy changes by delivering deliberated views on the questions at hand.
The format for these panels includes all the elements advocated by Democracy R&D, a network whose members specialise in citizens’ council-style events, from local to global. Participants are chosen by lottery selection, or similar, to ensure a diversity of views. Groups are granted the necessary time, information and opportunities to talk through their differences. Facilitators help them to weigh trade-offs in reaching well-grounded policy suggestions.
According to a forthcoming study by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, more than 700 such deliberative groups have been gathered over the past several decades. Their popularity is surging – and includes a significant number tasked with responding to the climate crisis. Since late 2018, these have been prompted in part by direct action campaigns and calls for citizens’ assemblies from Extinction Rebellion.
In 2019, Ostbelgien – the German-speaking part of Belgium – went a step further by voting to create a permanent second parliamentary chamber of members chosen by lottery.
Back in Fortaleza, 40 participants in Delibera Brasil met five times between October and December 2019. During the first three sessions, they learned about waste challenges in the city of 2.6 million people. For the remainder, they deliberated on how to handle them. Participants who made it to at least four meetings were paid R$500 (US$92) each for their time, transport costs and other expenses. If this is a revolution, it’s a small and quiet one – involving residents selected according to quotas for gender, age, occupation, income and education, then tasked with talking about the problems of rubbish dumped outside official collection processes and treatment facilities. Despite support from the city mayor, the prefecture and other stakeholders, there’s no guarantee of any concrete outcomes from the work. Putting recommendations into practice depends on office holders taking action before their mandate expires in 2020. The coronavirus pandemic, which has ravaged Brazil, is not helping. “When we looked at their plan of implementation we could see that it was going to take longer than we thought. Now, with coronavirus, we really don’t know,” says Delibera Brasil co-founder Silvia Cervellini.”