To realise deliberative democracy’s promise, we need to go beyond inclusion

In this conversation, Nivek Thompson of Deliberately Engaging (Australia) talks to Nicole Armos – the Manager of the Office of Knowledge and Practice at the Morris J. Wosk Centre for Dialogue (Canada). Nicole’s Centre just published ‘Beyond Inclusion: Equity in Public Engagement’ which received IAP2’s Research Project of the Year Prize.

This transcript is an edited version of their conversation recorded last February 8, 2023.

Nivek Thompson

We’re going to talk about the guide you recently developed, and I’d just like to start by quoting Edana Beauvais, who says, ‘democratic processes always begin with inclusion since collective agendas and decisions are only democratic to the degree that those affected by outcomes are empowered to influence them.’

Inclusion as one of the three democratic functions developed by Mark Warren. Those democratic functions are empowered inclusion, collective agenda-setting and rule formation, and collective decision-making. Edana sees inclusion as involving equity and equality, and I think you cover those in this guide. How do you understand the three related concepts of inclusion, equality and equity?

Nicole Armos

That’s such an excellent place to start because one of the things that came up for us when we were doing this research on inclusion and public engagement was that we had started by framing it under the term ‘inclusion.’ We were asking the question that many people ask in this practice: how do we include more diverse voices? How do we hear from more than the same ten people that we always get in the room?

And what we heard was that people were pushing back on that framing of inclusion. They were saying that it was not enough, and that we need to think about the larger concept of equity. From our understanding, inclusion is about inviting a range of voices, whereas equity talks about how power dynamics work in the room and how they work in the broader system.

So there are processes that can look very inclusive, where you have all the people in the room, but in the broader sense, there is no equity. For instance, if the input from those processes doesn’t actually impact the decision-making. If it looks like you’re consulting the public, but you’re not actually including their perspectives in a meaningful way in the final decision-making, that wouldn’t be inclusive; that wouldn’t be real equity. It’s also not real equity when we aren’t considering the many power dynamics and inequities in society that impact people’s ability to be in the room.

When we developed the Beyond Inclusion guide, our focus was public engagement in general, which could include formal, deliberative democracy processes, such as mini-publics, as well as broader public consultations. But even when you do use a lottery system to select participants, it can only be representative of certain demographics, certain experiences and certain identities. You can’t account for an exhaustive list of all the possible factors that can impact someone’s experience of the decision that you’re discussing or that will affect people’s ability to participate, including their interest, their trust in government, and their life situations.

People were pushing back on that framing of inclusion. They were saying that it was not enough, and that we need to think about the larger concept of equity.

As a simple example, I’m at the end of my second maternity leave, and it’s been really eye-opening to see how much my ability to participate in my community has changed now that I have two little ones. Everything from the timing the financial aspects of it, everything just shifts when you become a parent. Or if your parents become ill and you’re a caregiver for them, or if you yourself have health conditions, or if you have other responsibilities, there’s just a lack of time.

So that’s where I see there’s a difference between inclusion, which is, ‘we’re opening the doors, we want you all here,’ but is there real equity in terms of the way that we are structuring the process so that everyone has an equal opportunity to accept that invitation?

Nivek Thompson

That’s exactly my concern with deliberative mini-publics because it’s a multi-step process, and at least one step generally involves self-selection or self-nomination. Who are the people that don’t nominate themselves, and why? From the perspective of deliberative processes, particularly deliberative mini-publics, the general sense is that by designing the recruitment process to reach a wide cross section of a particular community and then using stratified random sampling from those who volunteer that we are actually meeting Principle 4 in your guide, which is ‘engage the internal diversity of a community’. However, I recruit mini-publics, and I know that there are challenges to recruiting historically marginalised people and so on. Thinking about this challenge, I really like the section that talks about how to address barriers to participation of marginalised people. And I’m interested in how you approached this challenge in the co-design and development of your guide. How how did you go about including marginalised people?

Nicole Armos

When we created this guide, it wasn’t as detailed a process, in terms of recruitment, as for mini-publics, it was more invitational. We only had the capacity, time and finances to offer four focus groups, so we wanted to be really thoughtful about who we were inviting from our local community, folks who we knew had experience with some kind of engagement work. We had one focus group with academics, another with folks who work in government or public institutions, and another was community-focused. And in the community focus groups, we were able to include community members who may have participated in the past in other engagement processes, as we wanted to hear from them what challenges they were seeing.

And one of the things that we did, for instance, in this particular process was we invited folks from community organizations and in that invitation, we asked them to think about someone from their community, someone they work with, who might be interested in this topic, and who might have something really valuable to contribute and either refer them to participate with us or come together

I remember we had newcomers to Canada for instance, who might not have otherwise been networked enough within the community to hear about our process. We had folks coming from a community organization that works with folks with cognitive and developmental disabilities, which, for instance, is one of those marginalized communities that really often gets left out of these processes because even if we do consider the disability community, it’s often with a focus on physical disabilities– which is obviously really important as well – but there are different considerations when you’re working with folks with cognitive disabilities.

The other thing that we did that was a little bit different was that we took a moment to reconsider our position in the process – and this is something we’ve done in other engagements as well at the Centre for Dialogue, where we cede power and take a step back and invite folks from the community to work as a facilitator, to be the voice and the image at the front of the room. And this creates a sense of safety and a sense of visible inclusion.

Who is at the front of the room? Who has the microphone?

As a facilitator you’re asking questions, you’re moving the process along, and while you may not really inserting your opinions into the process, your identity still does have an impact. Who is at the front of the room? Who has the microphone? That’s such an indicator of power in the room and can really shift the dynamic of who is able to speak up, how comfortable they feel. We worked with different facilitators for each of the focus groups and we worked quite closely with them leading up to it, so even though the core questions were similar in the four focus groups, we sat down beforehand with the facilitators to ask for their perspectives on the way we were framing the discussion. What do they think is really important given the community we were focusing on? And what should we consider in terms of accessibility, what should we be doing in the invitation process?

And I think that’s one of the key processes, and one of the principles in our guide, is just having a little bit of humility and knowing that you can’t always get it perfect. There will always be someone left out. And having that humility to be able to ask the folks in the room who is missing? Who else do we need to talk to? Who else is not here?

I’m a really big fan of any kind of process that can have multiple phases so that maybe you have an initial invitation, initial participants and then you assess from there who is missing, and then you can do another session and then another session. And obviously, that depends a lot on the budget of each of the processes, but I think that’s one of those really wonderful approaches to doing this so that you’re not expecting to get it right the first time. And if something came up for people and they weren’t able to participate, they have another chance.

Nivek Thompson

Based on my experience as a recruiter of deliberative mini-publics, and through my PhD research, a robust recruitment process will engage a broader range of people than you would normally get. You definitely see different people in the room than you would if you held just a public meeting, but there’s still a bias towards people with a higher level of education, just as one example, and I would imagine that part of the reason for that is the confidence those people have to participate. But no doubt there’s other factors. For example, I’ve had situations where the census data for a community tells me that a reasonable number in that community, a large percentage, are high school educated only. And yet, when I do the selection I you know everybody that’s in the category of high school educated will get selected and I still won’t have enough to match the census data, because they’re just not volunteering. When recruiting a mini-public we do aim to make the invitations attractive to catch people’s attention and we offer financial incentives to participate. But based on my experience this isn’t really enough. If we look at the list of barriers and challenges you mentioned in your guide, I’m just wondering how you think organisers of deliberative mini-publics could better engage marginalised groups and individuals?

When recruiting a mini-public we do aim to make the invitations attractive to catch people’s attention and we offer financial incentives to participate. But based on my experience this isn’t really enough.

Nicole Armos

You bring up a great point there. Let’s say you recruit for a mini-public using census data, there are folks who don’t participate in the census, who are under-counted, and so you might not hear from folks who are homeless or who face housing insecurity and don’t have a fixed address. You might not hear from folks who are marginalized politically and who might not have trust in the government and are not appearing in these official counts.

And then, I think a large part of it is confidence, and also, there’s a level of relationship to it. I think it’s very easy for someone to see an invitation but not respond if they’re living a very busy life or if they don’t have any personal or emotional connection to it. Maybe they don’t feel like they have a say. Maybe they don’t feel like they have experience with the topic or that their opinion about this topic doesn’t matter. There’s all kinds of barriers. Scheduling the time – are they able to take time off work or care responsibilities? I think one thing that could work is even if you use a random recruitment process, having folks on the ground kind of trying to engage people about what the invitation that has arrived at their doorstep is about, explaining it to them and trying to get some of that relationship back.

See: Putting Faith in Randomness and Personal Contact

One of the really powerful things that we’ve been able to do in our work, where we’re not using random selection, is we often recruit through partner organizations and folks who are on the ground and who can talk face-to-face with someone and invite them personally. I think there’s that relationship of trust that can really help. So maybe folks who are doing mini-publics still could reach out to those community organizations to ask if they can verbally or through the communication channels that work for the communities that they serve, could they invite people, could they say, ‘Hey, take a look in your mailbox, see if you have received one of these invitations. This is what it’s about.’

It should be something that folks would be excited about that ‘Hey, you got chosen by this lottery to be a part of this process.’ We could try to create a culture where that is something to be excited about and where folks would be there to boost people’s confidence and say to them ‘yes, your voice really matters; you got an invitation; sign up for this,’ encouraging them to think about their experiences with the topic and having that personal connection. I don’t know if there have been processes out there that have done this already, but it would be something I’d be really excited to hear about.

The more you’re able to forefront the accessibility features the better.

Also, working with partner organizations can also help in terms of figuring out the accessibility considerations. One of the things that we heard and that we’ve included in our guide is that the more you’re able to forefront the accessibility features the better. If you can mention that the space has an accessible entrance, or that there will be dietary options on the menu. Or, please fill in this box if you have other accessibility concerns, please fill in this box if you require support with childcare, with transportation costs, etc.

Nivek Thompson

I think one of the challenges in recruiting mini-publics is that one of the goals is to reach beyond activists, people who are already are at the table and are confident to participate. And that’s one of the reasons that there’s the random distribution of invitations, usually to people’s homes, or at least to their personal e-mail. The idea is to reach as many people as you can who wouldn’t normally be engaged, and I guess that’s one of the challenges of using networks. It can work and certainly letting people know to look out for an invitation is great. But there’s obviously a risk. It’s like when you approach high schools to recruit young people, you often get only members of the Student Council. So, it’s a challenge, in terms of what the goals are for recruitment.

Thinking beyond mini-publics to deliberative democracy more broadly, the aim is to support deliberation in a range of forums and places. What spaces or opportunities can you see to advance equity across the board?

Nicole Armos

Deliberative democracy within mini-publics is in many ways lining up with a lot of the principles of equity that we discuss in our guide. It has more of a structured way of including input into the decision-making process, the random recruitment that makes participation more representative, even though it does have limitations, and I think those are the areas where there needs to be more improvement in the broader field of deliberative democracy.

Is this just going to become another report put on the shelf? Is it just a public relations exercise where it looks like you’ve consulted us, but there isn’t really follow-through?

When we are looking at public engagements that are open, the recruitment is often a less rigorous process. We are also seeing a little bit less rigour in the tail end of that. So where do these collected thoughts go at the end? And, in my experience doing more of the open-invite public engagement processes, folks have become a little bit cynical, have become a little bit less trustful that when they say something at the table that it’s going to matter. I’ve heard folks saying ‘is this just going to become another report put on the shelf? Is it just a public relations exercise where it looks like you’ve consulted us, but there isn’t really follow-through, and there isn’t always a follow-up.’

If an engagement process doesn’t have the representation that was needed, and they would need to try again, sometimes there isn’t the time, or there isn’t the budget, and so you end up having processes that weren’t fully representative, didn’t really get the inclusion that they needed, the diversity that they needed, but they go along, and they make the decision, because of time and budget constraints.

These are flaws that are not always easy to fix, but I think we do need to work more on bolstering trust by being accountable.

So, these are flaws that are not always easy to fix, but I think we do need to work more on bolstering trust by being accountable. That’s why we put it as our number one principle in this guide. First of all, we need the transparency to say, ‘this is where we are in the process. This is what’s already been decided. This is what’s still on the table. This is how much your input is going to matter.’ I see the IAP2 spectrum as a tool, very early on in the process to help decision-makers to understand for themselves – what kind of participation are you asking for? What are you actually planning to do with this input? Then using that as a basis to decide everything else. You need to be transparent about that, and you need to let people know what to expect.

Then I think having that transparency throughout and having the commitment at the end to follow up. I think those kind of wrap-around aspects of engagement, such as reporting back, tend to be forgotten when discussing inclusion. People are just so focused on ‘how do we get the people in the room that we need? How do we get the checklist of all the demographics that we need, to show in our pie charts that the people were there,’ that they forget these wrap-around aspects that then increase trust for future participation and actually make the process meaningful. It means that you’ve included the people in the decision-making instead of just inside the building.

I think those are the areas that, more broadly we need to work on: taking those things more seriously and trying to think about how we are doing every step really carefully, so that we are building a really robust process. Even if it is something that’s low on the spectrum of participation, it still should have the right checks and balances to make sure that it is respectful of people’s time.

Nivek Thompson

I totally agree and liked that aspect of your principles where it goes beyond just the who’s in the room side of things. And that’s one of the reasons I used Warren’s democratic functions approach in my PhD research. He talks about inclusion and he talks about collective will-formation. So that’s the people in the room coming up with recommendations. Then he’s got collective decision-making which relates to how the decisions made reflect the will formation of the participants. And you know, some people have added accountability to the democratic functions to say that there has to be that end point where you come back to people and let them know – what you do with their input. I think it’s really good not to separate input and output totally. Whilst analytically, it helps to have separate functions, there definitely needs to be a recognition that there’s a flow-through.
Is there anything else you’d like to add that you think deliberative scholars would be interested in it from your perspective, anything that you thought of when you were developing this guide?

Nicole Armos

I think I’ll add one other aspect since we are talking about the wrap-around pieces of engagement. In public engagement processes, I’m often the analyst and the writer, and one of the things I really liked when we made this guide was that we were able to include a peer review process. We’ve done it only once before when we worked with Canada’s National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. I did the data analysis, I wrote the report, and then we looped back to participants from the process and invited them to validate the report, because one of the things that’s also forgotten is that analysis report writing is a subjective process to some degree. It’s not a recording of the session, it’s a summary, and ideas can be framed in different ways. The way we use language is really powerful, as is the way we prioritize things in a report.

How are people involving the participants in the sense-making and reporting, and in the way that this is ultimately framed?

So, I personally really loved this part of doing this guide, where we had over ten peer reviewers. We essentially sent them the final draft of the guide, and we opened up the vulnerability box again, and it was everything from ‘you need a comma here’ to ‘this section doesn’t make sense’ to ‘you need to reframe this,’ to ‘this language is problematic,’ and it was so, so powerful, especially in the Beyond Inclusion guide where we were working with a little bit more flexible timing and funding than we usually do.

That’s an area that I am really curious about exploring and innovating and understanding what people are already doing in the field in relation to this. How are people involving the participants in the sense-making and reporting, and in the way that this is ultimately framed? In some mini-publics I’ve heard of the participants at least helping to frame the priorities. I don’t know who is actually doing the writing, whether it is the staff or the participants. But I think if we can think about that and think about how this work is being reported out, that’s another layer of inclusion that really interests me.

Nivek Thompson

In Australia, this the standard approach, although obviously, it’s not in 100% of deliberative mini-publics. And that is to give the writing of the report to the deliberative mini-public to do. They might ask for examples of other reports or whatever but in the end, they write up their recommendations. It’s a very strong practice, almost a rule-in-use, if you like, that the facilitators don’t do any of that. Of course, this depends on the size of the mini-public, there might be various processes where parts of the report might be given to sub-groups, that sort of thing. The main challenge is time, because usually they’ve made the recommendations, and they’re also encouraged to provide reasons in their reports. This reason giving takes a little bit more time and they may or may not have that time within the process, but certainly that’s the aim – to have no interpretation from outside of the actual group in their report.

Nicole Armos

That’s excellent. And I think that’s one example of where I feel the broader field of public engagement has so much to learn from the level of rigour that has gone into deliberative mini-publics and the amount of thoughtfulness in all the steps of the process. I think there’s such an interest in engagement nowadays. And in the spirit of wanting to include more voices, it’s great to have that enthusiasm amongst decision-makers, but it would be so great to see more of that translate to how we are setting up these processes, from beginning to end. Things like that practice of having the participants write the report, I have not seen in the world of broader public engagement, at least here in our area, because I think it is very time-consuming, right? Figuring out how we can bring some of these features out into the broader field and translate them, even if it’s not to the same level and detail, I think it is something that we really need to think about.

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