See also: Citizen Reflective Councils
* * * *
A Citizen Deliberative Council (CDC) is a temporary council
of citizens convened to deliberate
about public concerns (either about a specific issue or the general
state of the community and its future) and to provide guidance
for officials and the public.
Although "citizen deliberation" happens in many
forms, a Citizen Deliberative Council is a special form of deliberation
structured and convened to inform officials and the public about
what The People as a whole really want.
These councils are appearing around the world and have
the potential to make governmental systems more answerable, effective
Citizen Deliberative Councils are liberating latent and previously
untapped levels of collective intelligence within civil society
and applying that intelligence to the formulation of public policy
around the globe.
CDCs are a demonstrable world-wide movement facilitating the
emergence of deep levels of collective wisdom necessary to transform
our troubled global culture.
This article offers a working definition for "Citizen
Deliberative Councils," a brief history of their evolution
and specific examples of how these councils are being used to
make significant improvements in civic life on a wide variety
of issues around the world. See also Using
Citizen Deliberative Councils to Make Democracy More Potent and
Awake for an extensive list of how such councils can be integrated
into representative governance.
Citizen Deliberative Councils
All these approaches add to a democratic society's ability
to function more wisely and fairly. But here I am focusing on
a particular form -- citizen deliberative councils -- which I
believe has a unique and pivotal role to play in bringing the
wisdom of citizens to the formal structures of politics and governance.
These temporary councils of citizens reflect the diversity of
the population, so when they're convened to deliberate on public
concerns and provide guidance for officials and the public, they
have a special legitimacy.
This is the primary thing that makes them special -- that they
are made up of ordinary citizens whose diversity embodies the
diversity of the population from which they were drawn. They are,
in essence, an ad hoc microcosm of a community, state or country,
convened to reflect the views and concerns of that community,
state or country, in an interactive setting. Participants may
be selected randomly or scientifically -- or by a combination
of both methods. But they differ from participants in most other
forms of citizen deliberation in that they are not chosen as representatives,
stakeholders or experts. They are themselves, and they show up
simply as peer citizens. In their role as a citizen council, however,
they may consult with representatives, experts or other stakeholders,
to improve their understanding of the issues they're exploring.
There are many varieties of citizen deliberative councils,
but they all share one purpose and seven characteristics.
The purpose of a citizen deliberative council is to
inform officials and the public of what The People as a whole
would really want if they were to carefully think about it and
talk it over with each other.
The seven characteristics shared by every citizen deliberative
- It is an organized face-to-face assembly.
- It is made up of people selected so that their collective
diversity fairly reflects the diversity of the larger community
from which they were chosen. (In this context, "community"
means any coherent civic population, whether a block, a citizens'
organization, a city, a province, a country, or any other such
- It is convened temporarily, for a limited number of days
-- almost always for more than a single day -- usually a few
days to a week of actual meetings, sometimes distributed over
- Its members deliberate as peer citizens, setting aside any
other role or status they may have.
- It has an explicit mandate to address public issues or the
concerns of its community.
- It uses forms of dialogue, usually facilitated, that enable
its diverse members to really hear each other, to expand and
deepen their understanding of the issues involved and to engage
together in seeking creative ways their community might address
- At its conclusion, it issues findings and/or recommendations
to concerned officials and to the larger community from which
its members came and to which they return when their reports
are submitted. Usually there is an expectation of further community
dialogue stimulated by the report, and this is sometimes intentionally
included as part of the overall process.
Although few people realize it, hundreds of these groups of
ordinary citizens have been formally convened all over the world
for over thirty years. They have involved tens of thousands --
if not hundreds of thousands -- of people in both "developed"
and "developing" nations. This is happening in many
places right now. Here are four examples, just to give you a taste:
- Poor Indian farmers held a deliberative council investigating
approaches to economic development -- and decided they wanted
to continue their subsistence farming.
- Some Britons passed official judgment on whether their local
HMO should offer chiropractic services.
- Australian suburbanites deliberated on what to do about pollution
and erosion associated with rainwater that was wrecking their
- Eighteen down-home Americans became expert enough in a few
days to tell Twin Cities municipal authorities how to deal with
the area's solid waste disposal. They wanted more sustainable
In every case, ordinary people reviewed the facts and came
up with common-sense solutions. In all four of these examples,
the format used was a citizens
jury, a group of 10-20 people who select and cross-examine
diverse experts on an issue and then present recommendations to
a convening authority. This approach was created by Ned Crosby
in the U.S. in the early 1970's and developed by him and his nonprofit
over the next three decades.
The citizens jury model was picked up by English activists
who carried it around the world. Many other people have since
started using it. In its many variations,* the
citizens jury is the most widely used and tested model of citizen
deliberative council in the world, and has inspired many
creative applications and visions -- including evaluating
politicians and ballot initiatives:
- In his book By
Popular Demand, John Gastil suggests that randomly selected
citizen panels could be used for evaluating candidates and ballot
initiatives (with their recommendations distributed to every
voter and reflected on the ballot, itself) and also to generate
public judgment about controversial legislation before it is
- The National Initiative for Democracy
advocates a national ballot initiative process in which anyone
can propose a law, which is then reviewed by randomly selected
citizen councils -- along with many other qualifying steps --
before it can be voted on by all citizens.
- Plan for a Healthy Democracy
(founded by Ned Crosby) envisions a randomly selected citizens
jury which studies issues, initiatives, candidates or public
officials carefully and then interacts with a closed-circuit
television audience of hundreds of fellow citizens before making
its final recommendations.
Unbeknownst to Ned Crosby, a few years before he came up with
the citizens jury idea, a German named Peter Dienel came up with
a remarkably similar innovation he called "planning
cells" (Planungzellen). These involved a number of simultaneous
juries (or "cells"), each with about 25 members, all
of whom were considering the same issue. The conclusions of the
diverse cells were collected, compared and then compiled into
one "citizen report" by the organizers/facilitators.
Once the report was cleared through the participants, it was presented
to the sponsor, the media and other interested parties. A few
dozen of these have been held in Germany, and the method is still
being used there. (See Fairness and Competence in Citizen Participation:
Evaluating Models for Environmental Discourse, edited by Ortwin
Renn, Thomas Webler and Peter Wiedemann [Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1995] pp. 117-156.)
More than a decade after Crosby and Dienel's innovations, another
form of citizen deliberative council was instituted in Denmark.
In this model, experts testified to the citizens' council in open
public hearings, after which the council was facilitated to a
consensus before they issued their report. Since the mid-80's,
these Danish consensus conferences
have been convened by an official parliamentary office to review
controversial technological issues being considered for legislation.
Denmark may be the only place in the world where citizen deliberative
councils are institutionalized as part of the operations of government.
In addition to the Danes' official consensus conferences, a couple
of dozen of them have been held unoffically elsewhere in the world.
Quite a number of consensus conferences and other types of citizen
deliberative council have been convened to consider "the
genetic engineering of food." The popularity of this topic
means that findings and recommendations from diverse countries
could be fruitfully compared.)
The most empowered form of Citizen Deliberative Council so far held is
the Citizens Assembly
in British Columbia, Canada. This panel of 160 citizens (one man and
one woman randomly selected from each legislative district) was convened
in 2004 to study and make recommendations on electoral reform. They met
every other weekend for a year, generating recommendations for citizen
approval in an election which, if approved, become law.
Since the Danish model and some other forms of citizen deliberative
council use consensus process (in which all participants agree
on their final statement), I call them "citizen consensus
councils." I believe they deserve their own category because
the search for consensus demands a particular kind of creativity
to work through the differences between diverse participants,
and thus has special potential to produce wisdom, particularly
when it's done repeatedly over time. Other examples of citizen
consensus councils include:
·Jim Rough's Wisdom Councils.
This innovation involves selecting one to two dozen citizens at random
at least once a year to articulate The People's concerns and perspectives.
This form of citizen consensus council uses a particularly powerful process,
dynamic facilitation, that can
uncover unexpectedly innovative approaches to problems -- and transform
the people involved -- simply by following the group's interests and energy.
This process tends to turn any existing conflict into a stimulant to engage
people's co-creativity. (See also Citizen Reflective
An experimental citizens'
panel organized by Maclean's magazine in Canada in
1991. Maclean's convened a dozen Canadians scientifically
selected to represent the demographic and political diversity
of Canada. After two days of intense conflict moderated by expert
facilitation, they finally discovered their common fellowship
and, on the third day, finalized a consensus vision for their
entire country. Maclean's provided about 40 pages of coverage,
in addition to an hour long feature TV documentary about the process
and its results.
Organizers of citizens juries and all the other citizen deliberative
councils function in far-flung, decentralized, leaderful networks
that are just beginning to see themselves as a movement. But I
believe it is already a movement.
A major reason I believe that is that there's more involved
than just the actual councils. For example, dozens of brilliant
investigators and academics are describing, researching and critiquing
a wide range of citizen deliberations. They're asking excellent
questions about the functioning of these groups and their role
in the world. In particular, more and more practitioners, activists,
and academics are looking at how to increase the power of citizen
deliberative bodies so that they actually impact official policy
and the behavior of communities and countries. They are setting
the stage for powerful conversations and community wisdom to transform
The growth of their inquiries and work is reflected in the
fact that Google.com's listings
for "deliberative democracy," "citizens juries,"
and "citizen deliberation" doubled
in the year and a half between June 2002 and December 2003.
If you want to go directly to some great overviews and descriptions
of widespread use of citizens' juries and other such deliberative
processes, take a look at these two excellent compilations:
Deliberative Polling and Deliberative Democracy"
environmental policy processes: experiences from North and South"
(or click on "IDS Working Paper 113" at the bottom of
Increasingly, investigators of this phenomenon are realizing
that conversations are not just a tool for change. They are the
medium through which all of us together understand and create
the realities we live in. Citizen deliberative councils promise
to uplift the quality and power of every conversation that happens
among citizens, to shift the entire "conversational field"
in which we shape our past, present and future.
No longer need our collective stories be written by powerholders
beyond our reach. They can be written by our own neighbors, as
they search for deeper truths on our behalf, describing our experience
and guiding our journey, in full view of the rest of us.
I find tremendous hope in that possibility.
* The Jefferson Center has trademarked the
capitalized version of the phrase Citizens Jury®, and has
reserved the use of the phrase in the United States for citizen
deliberative councils overseen by them. Similar efforts that don't
use that phrase, or that are undertaken in other countries, do
not require their involvement or approval.
Can Citizen Deliberative Councils
Legitimately Claim to Generate a 'People's Voice' on Important
Public Concerns? - a reflection by Tom Atlee, July 2, 2002
Using Citizen Deliberative
Councils to Make Democracy More Potent and Awake for an extensive
list of how such councils can be integrated into representative