Inclusive topic selection: reflections on Mostar’s first citizens’ assembly

Yves Dejaeghere
Usually, citizens’ assemblies have a commissioning authority that wants citizens to help them solve a problem. The topic is usually chosen by this authority. This can be very powerful because it’s a commitment of that authority to do something on that topic. It can also sometimes be weak, if there is pressure to do citizen engagement but no political will, they might propose an irrelevant topic.

Damir Kapidžić
In Mostar there was a problem in going down this traditional route because there was no commissioning authority at the time the idea of a citizens’ assembly came to be. Mostar, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, did not have a legitimate local government for eight years because they did not hold elections for 12 years. This was due to political gridlock as party leaders from different ethnic groups could not agree on electoral reform. In this context, one initiative by the Council of Europe’s Reflection Group on Mostar was to allow citizens more input into political decision-making, and the idea was to do this with a citizens’ assembly. Given the lack of a legitimate commissioning authority in Mostar, organisers proposed a more inclusive process. The idea came from the group of experts tasked with designing the assembly, together with the Council of Europe. We wanted to open this process up to allow all stakeholders in the city input into defining the topic for deliberation. This was done in five stages:

1. An online poll of all Mostar residents who were invited to propose a topic resulted in 1826 responses which were grouped into 69 different topics.
2. The top 20 of the 69 topics, based on the number of responses in each, were given to a group of stakeholders from civil society who were selected by the Council of Europe through open and direct invitation. During an online panel, these stakeholders discussed the 20 proposals in a moderated discussion in the local language. They voted on them and the top six proposals moved on to the next step. Whilst this was happening, elections were held in the city, so there was a newly formed local city council and newly elected mayor.
3. The newly elected council then got the top six proposals and discussed them in an online panel with representatives from governing and opposition parties. They debated on each and voted again.
4. The three topics with the most votes were given back to the citizens themselves to decide, with a remit defined for each. These remits were prepared by the international experts – Marcin Gerwin, Yves and myself, together with the Council of Europe and the newly elected Mayor.
5. Finally, through a poll during the registration process for the citizens’ assembly, 5000 letters were sent out to households in Mostar, and independently of their registration, citizens could choose the topic and remit of deliberation. The final selection was about city cleanliness and public spaces which was consistently ranked first across all steps of the process by all who were involved.

The open approach to selecting topics gave newly elected city officials a form of legitimacy they needed to regain political trust among the population after the city didn’t hold elections for so long. Even the topics that didn’t get selected but were still highly ranked, are issues that the City needs to look into as well. These are also things on their priority list. So local authorities didn’t just get a topic for the citizens assembly, they got a priority list of public concerns which they can now try to solve.

The open approach to selecting topics gave newly elected city officials a form of legitimacy they needed to regain political trust among the population.

Yves
In terms of outcomes, some recommendations on public spaces were minor, but some were really major, for example about public utility companies. Some really went into governance issues which touched upon the inter-ethnic way of how Mostar is governed.

So from my perspective, Mostar was an amazing process for a mid-sized city, especially given the predisposition that there was no governing authority in the beginning. But one big factor is that the Council of Europe was very supportive. Both in cost and Human Resources, there was an enormous amount of support available. So one thing to be mindful of is how to manage when the city has to organise this themselves. This is particularly the case in regions where international organisations suddenly bring in a lot of resources and then disappear. Now, luckily, the Council of Europe is also supporting the second iteration in Mostar and has invested in capacity building and is involved in oversight of other assemblies in Bosnia. But it is definitely something to be mindful of.

Damir
While the open topic selection did not take up too many additional resources, it did take up a lot of time. It was enormously time-consuming and delayed other elements of the process. So ideally, an inclusive topic selection process with online polling, panel discussions and voting needs much better time management. We went forward with this not knowing exactly what to expect and managing these different steps and panels took more time than anticipated. If anybody wants to repeat this, just keep in mind that it’s not weeks, but a month or several months that this requires to be implemented.

In cases where there is a very clear idea of the topic, there’s no need to open up the process to this extent. But where it’s not clear or where there are conflicting ideas and authorities can only address one because of time or resources, then it can make sense to open up topic selection to include all elements of society. Leaders might know citizens’ problems, but they don’t know their priorities. It goes beyond just polling citizens, there is also the deliberative element that is included in the topic selection that is central to the process we used.

Yves
When the topic selection by an authority can be contentious or political, I think there really is a legitimacy benefit. But how it is managed is important. If you look at Mostar, having a workshop with a limited number of civil society actors in one room was already very time-consuming. Imagine this on a regional level, or in countries with a very dense civil society network; this might become practically very challenging.

When the topic selection is contentious or political, I think there really is a legitimacy benefit to opening it up.

So it’s important to think about how this model could be adapted for different situations. In Ostbelgien for example, a group of citizens is a filter for bottom-up crowdsourced topics. But now that they have done the cycle of assemblies several times, there is a proposal supported by all political parties to amend the bill regulating the process. In it, they suggest that one out of five topics for assemblies should be chosen from a list of three options proposed by the parliament. The new proposal (available in German only) would then allow citizens in the Assemblies to amend the remit proposed to them. So we need to learn from different ways of handling topic selection.

Many people would tell you to be wary of capture or astroturfing, but I think the topic selection is less contentious than the remit. The remit is the task itself given to the citizens, often phrased as a question. The remit very often is still written together with either a commission or deliberative democracy experts, because of course, the way you phrase the exact question is crucial. So on the one hand, I’m more afraid of the topic remit being controlled than the topic. But on the other hand, if you only emphasize a bottom-up topic approach, you have to make sure that politicians are in some ways involved. Because if they feel a topic is imposed they will be reluctant to implement recommendations.

To open up topic selection somewhere else, you really need to be mindful of all the local conditions. For example in Mostar, the Council of Europe agreed to fund some recommendations; this was an additional stimulus that might not be present elsewhere. So the success of this case should also be seen within its specific context.

Notes and Acknowledgements
The design decisions for Mostar were taken together with the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe and the international experts, which included the authors of this article, and Marcin Gerwin, whose experience and insights from Poland were invaluable. We would also like to thank Lucy Parry and Lyn Carson for their support and encouragement in getting this published!

About the Authors
Damir Kapidžić is an Associate Professor at the University of Sarajevo and a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Weatherhead Center. He has advised several deliberative processes and citizens’ assemblies in Southeast Europe, mostly where a post-conflict environment overlaps with some kind of diversity in the population. He is working on a book on citizens’ assemblies in post-conflict contexts.

Yves Dejaeghere is Director of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy Europe, which federates expertise on deliberative democracy throughout Europe, and before that was the coordinator of the Belgian G1000 think tank on deliberative democracy.