Resisting colonisation, avoiding tropicalisation: Deliberative wave in the Global South

In the second part of this series, we are featuring reflections on the consequences of the reports to the practice of deliberative democracy outside resource-rich countries. Each of these reflections emphasise the need to broaden the discussion of the deliberative wave to the varied experiences of the Global South, and in so doing, broker a global conversation about what it means to pursue deliberative democracy’s emancipatory goals.

Interrogating the normative power of OECD guidelines

Melisa Ross

The OECD’s Evaluation Guidelines (the Guidelines) is a gift to early career scholars. It levels access for newcomers in the field to get a credible overview of the ever-expanding field of democratic deliberation. It presents a minimal framework and multiple methods for assessing the quality of minipublics that can facilitate comparability across cases and evaluations. This report, indeed, is a welcome development.

Yet, the document also invites reflection on some open questions in the field. How do we examine the impact and embeddedness of deliberative processes on representative democracies? What does ‘impact’ even mean?

The Guidelines examine ‘pathways’ towards institutionalisation as a measurement, but should we, as deliberative democrats, come to terms with the absence of alternative indicators of success other than permanence and government response? Can we account for impact beyond formal structures? How can the field become more receptive to the ‘natural life’ of deliberative processes as part of the larger systems and ecosystems of participation that exist beyond government institutions?

We must acknowledge its normative power, informed by practices from resource-rich countries, that sets a particular bar for the design, implementation and evaluation of deliberation.

This leads us to consider how this framework will travel beyond the scope of OECD countries. While an important tool, we must acknowledge its normative power, informed by practices from resource-rich countries, that sets a particular bar for the design, implementation and evaluation of deliberation.
To what extent can this framework operate in contexts other than the Global North? How can we, as researchers and practitioners, avoid unjust demands for quality in deliberation implemented across the world under highly uneven and diverse conditions? How do we transform and adapt this framework to ensure that Global South processes will not be systematically downgraded for their constraints and limited resources?

Beyond the OECD Guidelines, these questions will continue to challenge the theory and practice of deliberative democracy in the years to come.

Melisa Ross is a doctoral researcher at BGSS Berlin Graduate School of Social Sciences and research fellow of the Healthier Democracies project at Public Agenda. She tweets @kmelisaross.

Cite as: Ross, M. (2022) ‘Interrogating the normative power of OECD guidelines’ in Resisting colonisation, avoiding tropicalisation: Deliberative wave in the Global South. Edited by N. Curato. Deliberative Democracy Digest. 3rd, May. Available at: https://www.publicdeliberation.net/welcome-to-the-deliberative-democracy-digest/

The consequences of OECD’s prescriptions

Brenda Ogembo

The recently launched OECD Guidelines on evaluating and institutionalising representative deliberative processes are vital contributions to the deliberative democracy discourse.

However, these two reports also raise important questions on contextual relevance and affordability. There have been numerous criticisms levelled at ongoing studies of public deliberation as being too ‘western-centric,’ with much of the existing empirical research on the subject conducted in countries of the Global South.

We need to acknowledge inherent biases in public deliberation models that emerge from a focus on countries in the Global North.

The OECD reports appear to validate this criticism, with all but one of its eight sampled countries being in the Global North. Accordingly, we need to acknowledge inherent biases in public deliberation models that emerge from a focus on countries in the Global North, and how that ultimately shapes the character of proposed deliberative practices. Not only do most countries in the Global South have a shared postcolonial history that informs their political engagement traditions (or resistance to it); many of these countries are also emerging economies with limited resources for funding necessary public services, let alone resource-intensive representative public deliberation initiatives.

Although the OECD report does acknowledge that the proposed recommendations should be adapted for context, the continued practice of failing to acknowledge and study emerging public deliberation practices in the Global South—because they do not meet ‘western’ deliberative standards—is a broader failure to the expansion of public deliberation which continues to evolve in the character of the western gaze. Instead, the continued evolution of expensive representative public deliberation standards more suited to the Global North is increasingly making deliberative practices more unattainable for those who perhaps need them the most to safeguard their emerging and often fragile democracies.

Dr. Brenda Ogembo is a principal clerk assistant and the deputy head of the Senate Liaison Office at the Parliament of Kenya. One of her key responsibilities is creatively finding ways to institutionalise representative public deliberation in the Kenyan Senate. She occasionally tweets @akothogembo.

Cite as: Ogembo, B. (2022) ‘The consequences of OECD’s prescriptions,’ in Resisting colonisation, avoiding tropicalisation: Deliberative wave in the Global South. Edited by N. Curato. Deliberative Democracy Digest. 3rd, May. Available at: https://www.publicdeliberation.net/welcome-to-the-deliberative-democracy-digest/

The OECD needs to learn from nondemocratic countries too

Su Yun Woo

The recent OECD reports on evaluating and institutionalising representative deliberative processes are an amazing feat. The work that went into consolidating a wealth of knowledge into succinct, yet sufficient information is nothing short of impressive. Indeed, there are many lessons to be learned from the case studies featured in the report—from the itinerant citizens’ assembly in Bogotá to the citizens’ councils in Vorarlberg.

As a scholar studying deliberation in nondemocratic countries, the reports offer inspiration to build democratic structures that place citizens at the centre. But I also could not help but wonder whether learning is a one-way street. Can the OECD also learn from nondemocratic contexts?

My work on China reveals that the country is having its own unique wave of participatory innovations. This encompasses formalised practices such as public hearings (at a national level relating to price changes in utilities), consultative practices (heart-to-heart talks in Wenling which were the precursor to deliberative polls), and participatory budgeting (in cities such as Wenling and Chengdu). However, the extent to which the basic design principles of representative deliberative processes are upheld is contested. Organisers of deliberative processes have to make do with insufficient resources. They have to contend with the tightening control of the Communist Party of China over civil society. The complex and convoluted network of power relations and institutions, where the party dominates, places limits on what deliberative processes can achieve.

The OECD needs to consider the productive possibility of hearing the nondemocratic side of the story.

It is the organisers of representative deliberative processes in China that I had in mind when I read the report. It is not only democratic countries that try to bring the practice of deliberation to life, but also nondemocratic countries where civil society actors try to claim space for citizen voice at every possible opportunity. Although the OECD sets out minimum standards for representative deliberative processes, these standards remain unattainable despite best efforts. Does this mean deliberation in China is no good? Does it mean it’s not up to OECD standards, and therefore of lesser value?

The OECD needs to consider the productive possibility of hearing the nondemocratic side of the story. Many of the challenges nondemocratic countries face and provoke fruitful reflection on what it takes to run successful representative deliberative processes. The agency of local actors to improvise on deliberative processes according to local conditions is crucial. For example, a Chengdu nongovernment organisation involved in participatory budgeting has leveraged local knowledge and societal relations to activate participation by relying on community leaders to persuade residents to participate in participatory budgeting through WeChat, a popular social media communication tool in China. Learning from nondemocratic contexts does not excuse the deficiencies of these regimes, but it calls for a truly global conversation on what it means to have high-quality citizen deliberation.

Su Yun Woo is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Political Science at the University of Zurich. She is, at the same time, providing ad-hoc research support to Social Equity and Participation Center, a Chinese nongovernment organisation. Her research interests include deliberative governance, democratic innovations, China studies, urban governance and Chinese foreign policy.

Cite as: Woo, S. Y. (2022) ‘The OECD needs to learn from nondemocratic countries too’ in Resisting colonisation, avoiding tropicalisation: Deliberative wave in the Global South. Edited by N. Curato. Deliberative Democracy Digest. 3rd, May. Available at: https://www.publicdeliberation.net/welcome-to-the-deliberative-democracy-digest/

New frontiers for the deliberative wave

Felipe Rey

It is now a fact that the deliberative wave is a global wave. It has arrived in continents like South America: the minipublics on anticorruption policies in Chihuahua, Mexico; the minipublics organised by Delibera Brazil; the Itinerant Citizens Assembly in Bogotá and the Stanford Center for Deliberative Democracy’s deliberative poll in Chile.

This ignites a new discussion about the relationship between the Global North and the Global South. I think there are two trajectories we must resist. First is what some call ‘colonisation,’ which is understood as the export of models and institutions from the North to the South. But I think that we also must avoid the other extreme, which I call the ‘tropicalisation’ of deliberative democracy—the idea that the Global South needs its ‘own’ form of deliberative democracy.

I think what we need is to understand the differences to introduce appropriate normative criteria. I would like to suggest two particularities of the Global South that may prompt what Jane Mansbridge calls contingent normative criteria (i.e., criteria sensible to particular contexts).

Civil society organisations are not always willing to give terrain to randomly selected citizens.

First, the role of organised civic society. Due to very strong conceptions of participatory democracy and long-term struggles, civil society organisations are not always willing to give terrain to randomly selected citizens. For them, this could mean a loss of power in areas where they have been fighting for years (e.g., on environmental issues). They may also wonder why they should appeal to ordinary citizens if civil society organisations are already voicing their interests. These are legitimate worries. However, I also see a public fatigue with traditional mechanisms of participation, such as public hearings, and a need for public dialogue that goes beyond the kind of adversarial public debate in which organised civil society often participates. So, there is room for minipublics; we just have to take the current power balances into account.

Second, inequality and poverty. We have to think about the role of incentives in very poor societies and the role of experts, particularly in the learning phase of citizens assemblies. In highly unequal and segregated societies, experts live in bubbles. They go to private schools and universities, they have private pensions and health plans, and they do not use public transportation. The citizens who use public services have an expertise that experts don’t. I believe that in unequal societies, we should turn the model upside down and organise bottom-up assemblies in which citizens themselves are in charge of the education part. But, again, I also think that, in very unequal countries, minipublics have another advantage that may not be so visible in rich countries, and that is that citizens assemblies might be the only means of descriptive representation for the poor. That is why the socioeconomic criterion for the recruitment part is crucial. Half of the Itinerant Citizens Assembly in Bogotá were low-income citizens. These are levels of descriptive representation of the poor never achieved by formal or informal representative institutions.

After three decades of philosophical and theoretical refinement and institutional testing, mainly in the Global North, the expansion of the deliberative wave to the Global South will bring novel arguments in favor of deliberative democracy, new adaptations of its normative criteria and possibly new institutional designs adapted to these different contexts, without giving up deliberative democracy’s ideals of mutual respect, fairness and argumentative dialogue.

Felipe Rey is Professor of Public Law at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana and the founding partner of iDeemos (Colombia).

Cite as: Rey, F. (2022) ‘New frontiers for the deliberative wave’ in Resisting colonisation, avoiding tropicalisation: Deliberative wave in the Global South. Edited by N. Curato. Deliberative Democracy Digest. 3rd, May. Available at: https://www.publicdeliberation.net/welcome-to-the-deliberative-democracy-digest/