Deliberative Arenas Research Articles

The governance of peri-urban green infrastructures in the perspective of sustainable development. A Comparison in Europe

The paper analyses the governance models of six peri-urban green infrastructures (GIs) in Europe to reflect on GIs as critical loci to operationalize the sometimes naïve and rhetorical aim of sustainable development. In the study, the case of “Corona Verde”, the green belt around the City of Turin (Italy), is compared with other peri-urban GIs to discuss the potential of territorial governance for the construction of objective-led deliberative arenas as promoted by the UN 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. As a result, the hypothesis that peri-urban GIs are the most appropriate territorial systems to organise and manage a viable system of sustainability objectives is discussed and reframed. Although limited in scope and data, original traits of this study are the development of a territorial benchmarking comparing governance models rather than territories and the operationalisation of the governance for sustainability in terms of a continuous negotiation between the socio-ecological actors of a given territorial system.

Cultural Research on Drug Users in Indonesia

This study aims to examine the construction of rehabilitation for drug users in Indonesia from various aspects using a literature review approach. The aspects discussed include rehabilitation policies, the role of family and community, societal stigma, as well as cultural perspectives such as identity, consumer culture, and regulatory frameworks. Additionally, this research employs Jurgen Habermas's theory of Communicative Power as its theoretical foundation. The method used is a literature review by examining various previous studies relevant to the topic of drug user rehabilitation. The results indicate that rehabilitation is constructed from policy aspects that still need improvement, the importance of family support, the need to eliminate societal stigma, the diverse identities of drug users, consumer culture related to residence and occupation, and regulatory frameworks encompassing societal regulations and values. The theory of Communicative Power highlights the importance of public space as a deliberative arena in the rehabilitation process involving drug users, families, communities, and other stakeholders. This research provides a comprehensive overview of the construction of drug user rehabilitation in Indonesia from various perspectives and aspects that need attention to enhance the effectiveness of rehabilitation programs.

The Two Faces of Political Parties: How They Can Both Promote and Hinder Rawls’ Public Reason

This article explores the impact of political parties on a Rawlsian model of public reason. Political parties possess the potential to play a vital role in promoting public reason by connecting the background culture and the public political forum, identifying and systematizing the diverse array of opinions within a pluralist society. They can translate comprehensive doctrines into shared public values, advance electoral programs that articulate a reasonable political conception of justice and construct the deliberative arena necessary for public reason. However, it is crucial to recognize that political parties can also undermine public reason. They may prioritize sectarian interests over shared ones, appeal to non-liberal or perfectionist values, perpetuate misinformation, succumb to the influence of monetary donations, or adopt a closed-minded and rigid ideological stance. Achieving the ideal of public reason necessitates political parties striking a delicate balance between advancing their own agendas and respecting a practice of public justification.

Legislative science advice in Chile: exploring twelve years of knowledge producers participation in environmental committee discussions

ABSTRACT Exploring who participates in Congress committee hearings is key to assess how diverse and representative these spaces are. This article focuses on participation in Congress committees during the discussion of environmental bills in the last twelve years (2010-22) in Chile, specifically concentrating on the sub-group of knowledge producers – higher education, experts and think tanks – as committee hearings are a privileged access mechanism for science to reach the law-making process. Results show limited participation in addition to gender and geographical location biases in this sub-group of knowledge producers, raising concerns regarding the quantity and diversity of who provides evidence and research knowledge to Congress committees. These findings suggest further attention should be given to the way the participation of a more diverse group of knowledge producers to these privileged deliberative arenas can be improved.

Storytelling (Online Discussions/Discussion Quality)

Storytelling (Online Discussions/Discussion Quality)

Deliberative Democracy in Action: The Case of Musrenbang in Bandung, Indonesia

Abstract Indonesia has adopted a regularized public deliberation mechanism as a democratic innovation to ensure the inclusive involvement of citizens in city development planning. This research analyzes how the innovation, called Musrenbang, is conducted in one of the cities in Indonesia: Bandung. To conduct such analysis, we used literature analysis, direct observation, and focus group discussions (FGD s) to gather the research. This research found that Musrenbang in Bandung has the potential to be an ideal deliberative arena, although some challenges that disrupt the deliberation process are still present. We believe that the case of Musrenbang can further contribute to the deliberative democracy literature as a promising example of a regularized official system for public deliberation.

The effects of deliberation on citizen knowledge, attitudes and preferences: A case study of a Belgrade deliberative mini public

Participation in deliberative arenas is often lauded for its transformative impact on citizens? attitudes, sense of agency and ability to formulate concrete policy proposals. The focus of this paper is the first ever deliberative mini public in Belgrade, centred on the topic of expanding the pedestrian zone and rerouting traffic in the city core. By relying on a set of qualitative and quantitative data collected before and after the deliberation, we aim to explore the effects of the public deliberation on the participants? knowledge, attitudes and preferences. Our hypothesis was that participation in this deliberative process led to better understanding (enhanced knowledge) of the discussed topic and change in attitudes and preferences regarding its realization. The scope of this study is limited, given the non-experimental design and small sample. Overall, the results indicate that participants` knowledge on the topic of deliberation is enhanced, becoming more precise, elaborate and encompassing different perspectives. As for the attitudes and preferences, in most cases, around two-thirds of the sample changed their positions, while about a third of the sample changed sides, mostly agreeing less with the expansion of the pedestrian zone. The findings support the conclusion that, on a local level, deliberation has the capacity to inform and enhance competence for greater political participation.

India's environmental policy standoff: reimagining stakeholder engagement spaces

Various stakeholders from science, policy and practice aspire to shape public policy. What are the engagement spaces they operate in, and what are the characteristics of these spaces and the implications for effective policy making? The literature on the public policy formulation process in developing countries is sparse, and this study attempts to bridge this gap. We analyzed India's recent environmental policy making engagements using the lens of 'policy spaces'. We found that strong civil society coalitions have successfully 'claimed' the policy making space. Conventional policy making operating in 'closed' and 'invited' spaces is yet to accept this change, resulting in frequent standoffs. However, when policies emanated from the 'deliberative' space, there have been successes as well. The policy development space has consequently become contested, with nature conservation, forest-based livelihoods and corporate interests all staking their claim. To break this impasse, we recommend a graduation from confrontational and authoritative engagement approaches to deliberative arenas.

The Ambivalent Legacy of the Crisaeans: Athens’ Interstate Relations (and the Phocian Factor) in 4th-Century Public Discourse

SummaryThe First Sacred War was hotly debated in the 4th century. The crimes committed by the Crisaeans in this war were later equated to those committed by the Phocians during the Third Sacred War, or those committed by the Locrians of Amphissa during the Fourth Sacred War. This paper shows how the parallels drawn between the First and Third Sacred Wars (SW1–SW3) and between the First and Fourth Sacred Wars (SW1–SW4) were respectively shaped and used as an argument in two different milieus: in pro-Macedonian intellectual circles in Athens, and in the Athenian forensic and deliberative arena. The main aim of this paper is to understand why ‘SW1–SW3’ is not used as an argument in the latter. In fact, Athens’ most prominent politicians had to cope with the Athenian support for the Phocians in the so-called Third Sacred War. Thus, the Phocians were depicted as guilty, but not to the point that they were compared to the Crisaeans. The legacy of the latter was ambivalent and lent itself to this shift in meaning.

Different Arenas, Different Deliberative Quality? Using a Systemic Framework to Evaluate Online Deliberation on Immigration Policy in Germany

One major strand of contemporary research on political participation addresses online deliberation. Over time, online deliberation has become increasingly pluralistic. Our study applies a framework derived from systemic deliberative theory to evaluate different online deliberation processes on German immigration policy. A crucial premise of the systemic deliberative theory is that the quality of deliberation varies systematically between different arenas within a political system. We differentiate between highly formal, semi‐formal, and informal deliberative arenas (arenas 1–3) and develop seven theory‐driven hypotheses concerning the quality of deliberative procedures in arenas 1–3 that we test through quantitative content analysis. Our study confirms the overarching expectation: processes’ deliberative quality varies systematically between arenas. The highest level of (aggregated) deliberative quality is displayed in arena 1—deliberations, that is, on the government‐run consultation platform. The more fine‐grained analysis of different dimensions of deliberative quality reveals that the patterns observed with regards to certain dimensions of deliberative quality (e.g., constructiveness and reciprocity) do not conform with our theory‐driven hypotheses. We discuss the theoretical and empirical implications of these findings. Future collaborations of theoretical and empirical scholars of deliberative democracy must address the specifics of online communication and the function of emotional communication in different deliberative arenas.

Worlds, words, and spaces of resistance: Democracy and social media in consumer co-ops

This article explores how members of one of the largest Canadian consumer co-ops, reacting to what they saw as an assault on its democratic principles, use social media to try resisting the attempt from the board of directors to change its governance rules. Building on the Economies of Worth and Critical discourse analysis joint framework that considers power relations in the justification context, we unveil two essential moments. Initially, our analysis points to hegemonic justification struggles marked by the board and resisting consumer-members drawing on and reordering multiple worlds to debate the risk of democratic degeneration in consumer co-ops. Second, the critical insights suggest that the hegemonic control over the official deliberative arena pushed dissenting actors toward social media, an alternative space where they could deconstruct the co-ops-controlled discursive arena and create new conditions of possibility. Our article contributes to the literature on democratic degeneration in alternative organizations. More specifically, in the case of large consumer co-ops in which consumer-members have limited embodied presence, our results highlight how social media can offer a new space for debates, dissensus, and critical deconstruction. Our research also extends the post-structural criticism of the domination tendency of rational debate frameworks by showing that strategic displacement to new alternative spaces is essential to create new possibilities beyond those in central discursive arenas.

A Distinctly Rhetorical Space;Eusynoptosand the Greek Council-House

A Distinctly Rhetorical Space;<i>Eusynoptos</i>and the Greek Council-House

The Concept of De-Politicization and Its Consequences

This Issue collects contributions on the theme of the De-Politicization of [representative] pol-itics in the era of neoliberalism. We consider De-politicization as a set of changes in the ways power is exer-cised. These modes downgrade the political nature of decision-making and, through representation, give legitimacy to actors apparently less able to bear witness to the presence of the political. Politics appears less responsible for the decisions that affect the regulation of society and the impact of their costs and failures on economic and cultural processes. Political choices conditioned by the market acquire the charac-ter of necessity and inevitability. The attempts to legitimize the investigation of public choices through de-liberative arenas governed by non-political parameters, based on information and knowledge, are not ex-ternal to this aspect of de-politicization. A discursive de-politicization determines the convergence of pref-erences into a single, albeit diverse, cognitive construction of reality (frame for public actions). It is no coin-cidence that the prevailing paradigm in the contemporary liberal political economy has been narrated in the form of a single thought demonstrating a clear cultural hegemony of the trans-nationalized and financial-ized capitalism. Policies become inevitable responses lacking rational alternatives to the limits of develop-ment set by previous responses, with which contradictions and conflicts had previously been appeased. De-politicization is probably one of the causes of the growing distance between institutional politics and civil society in Western countries and, unavoidably, it determines certain consequences. We think that, on the social side, some of the consequences can be found in the political indifference on the part of citizens (po-litical apathy) and, by contrast, in growing forms of non-institutional social and political participation through the practices of social resilience and resistance; on the political side, we think that one of the con-sequences is the birth, everywhere in Europe, of populist parties and movements that, in their rhetoric, emphasize the intention to give back sovereignty to the people. The aim of this issue is to highlight these phenomena which, also in a critical, provocative way, can contribute to the description of the many aspects of this process through both theoretical and empirical work.

Sub-National Legislature and Democratic Consolidation in Nigeria&amp;#039;s Fourth Republic: Lessons from Osun State House of Assembly

This paper examines the contribution of sub-national legislature in reinforcing democratic consolidation in Nigeria by drawing lessons from the Osun state legislature in South-West Nigeria. Specifically, the authors interrogate changing party composition, oversight actions and executive reactions and constituencies' activities of members of the Assembly across three terms of twelve years: 1999-2003; 2003-2007 and 2007-2011. The analysis presented in the paper reveals that relationship between the Osun state legislature and executive has been defined by dominance by the latter manifested through financial dependence of the Assembly in carrying out legislative activities, overdependence on the executive for maintenance of members and their offices, domination of legislative agenda with executive bills and other executive oriented activities as well as reliance on the executive to guarantee legislative members' political career. The paper concludes that in spite of the foregoing drawbacks, the Osun state legislature remains relevant to the consolidation of democracy in Nigeria especially in its contributions towards legitimising, supporting and stabilising the polity and serving as deliberative arena for securing government policies and programmes.

Animal rights and the deliberative turn in democratic theory

Deliberative democracy has been castigated by those who regard it as exclusive and elitist because of its failure to take into account a range of structural inequalities existing within contemporary liberal democracies. As a result, it is suggested, deliberative arenas will merely reproduce these inequalities, advantaging the already powerful extolling mainstream worldviews excluding the interests of the less powerful and those expounding alternative worldviews. Moreover, the tactics employed by those excluded social movements seeking to right an injustice are typically those – involving various forms of protest and direct action – which are incompatible with the key characteristics of deliberatively democracy. This paper seeks to examine the case against deliberative democracy through the prism of animal rights. It will be argued that the critique of deliberative democracy, at least in the case of animal rights, is largely misplaced because it underestimates the rationalistic basis of animal rights philosophy, misunderstands the aspirational character of deliberative theory and mistakenly attributes problems that are not restricted to deliberation but result from interest group politics in general. It is further argued that this debate about the apparent incompatibility between the ideals of deliberative democracy and non-deliberative activism disguises the potential that deliberative democracy has for advocates of animal rights and, by extension, other social movements too.

Comunità, partecipazione e democrazia deliberativa: un’esperienza italiana

There is little doubt that deliberative democracy represents the most important innovation in the democratic debate and practices of recent decades. In the 1990s, after the pioneering phase, scholars progressively elaborated on both the conceptual and the operational problems of deliberative processes. Moreover, the internal dynamics of deliberative arenas as well as their relationships with politics and policy-making have been increasingly addressed by such analyses. The book Discutere e agire. Una sperimentazione di democrazia deliberativa a Novara (edited by Giacomo Balduzzi and Davide Servetti, Novara, Interlinea, 2014) describes the main aspects of an Italian experience. Although this case is just one of the many taking place in a context of growing spread of deliberative democracy, it shows some original elements. The attempt to create a stable connection between citizen concerns and policy-making, discussed in this book, is comparable only with the experiences of participatory budgeting, which however are constrained within a format that limits citizens’ participation to the allocation of a portion of the municipal budget.

Assessing the benefits and the shortcomings of participation – findings from a test in Bari (Italy)

Participation is advocated as an essential component of strategies and policies for sustainable urban mobility. This paper refers to the overall literature on participation and provides the design, test and ex-post evaluation of a deliberative-participative procedure (DPP) aimed at selecting a new scheme for the regulation of traffic and parking in the “Murat”, a central area of Bari (Italy). The potential benefits and shortcomings of participation were explicitly considered when designing a DPP which integrates three tools: an opinion poll and two deliberative arenas – the “stakeholder dialogue” and the “citizens’ jury”. The ex-post evaluation of the test confirmed ex-ante design choices. The DPP was effective and learning was generated: the use of understandable techniques for deliberation and assessment helped participants to generate an unambiguous final result which was based on the “hybridisation” of the alternative schemes proposed to the participants at the beginning of the procedure. The “last word” given to the citizens’ jury avoided that the most powerful stakeholders may capture the DPP. Only a “frustration” effect was clearly generated because of the limited involvement of the Municipality of Bari, thus confirming that the involvement of the relevant Authority is an essential requisite for successful participation. We suggest that the generation of new knowledge and learning could be further assured by the participation of citizens and stakeholders to the definition of the alternatives they will assess later.

What did we learn about citizen involvement in the health policy process: lessons from Brazil

In this paper I argue that citizen involvement helped to promote a more equitable distribution of public health services in Brazil. This achievement involved a balance of contributions from social actors and health system managers in forging policy innovations and institutional arrangements that linked bottom up innovation with national policy leveraging and decentralized implementation. The paper briefly describes this cycle and its relation with the implementation of a national network of forums for citizen involvement in health policy, inquiring in more detail the conditions that favor the association between these forums and the policy making process. Our results do not corroborate the idea that deliberative arenas should be insulated from political passions; rather, they suggest that participation of mobilized social actors contributes to the effectiveness of these forums. This contribution happens both due to the knowledge that these actors bring about problems in the area and to their insertion in networks that connect forums to a wide set of social organizations and political, governmental, and health institutions, which in turn facilitate the dissemination and negotiation of the proposals and demands formulated by the forums. However, our results also suggest that the inclusion of these actors increases confrontation to the detriment of deliberation, which brings us to the discussion of the role that could be played by mediators who are well-equipped to construct deliberative processes.

Democracies with a future: Degrowth and the democratic tradition

The interrogation of a possible connection between degrowth and democracy inspires some questions of political epistemology. Is degrowth a socio-economic project which can be simply proposed as an “issue” and a “goal” in the democratic representative system, without discussing forms and processes of the political institutions themselves? Is the degrowth perspective fully compatible with the democratic theories and practices as we currently know them?The perspective of degrowth allows a radical enlightenment of the blind spots of “really existing” democracies but also of the democratic theory. From a factual point of view, we need to acknowledge the existence of an historical connection between economic and political freedoms, since the claim for the autonomy of business has historically been a way to guarantee freedoms and civil rights to citizens, against the tyranny of the central political and religious authorities. Nevertheless, in the current configuration of market societies, the centre of the real power has largely moved from the political and institutional sphere to the economic one. Today the re-foundation of a democratic freedom and of new civil rights should be affirmed against a more and more pervasive economic tyranny. On this basis, a democratic re-foundation in the perspective of degrowth – which includes ecological, social and anthropological challenges – might be imagined.The second part of this paper will be devoted to the formulation of hypotheses about which foundations might be imagined for a radical reform of the democratic theory and institutions, building on degrowth perspective. From the point of view of the political system, degrowth represents a new “cleavage” if confronted with the historical ones on which classical democracies have been structured. From the point of view of the political organization, degrowth clashes with the traditional competitive electoral models; so I will illustrate some perspectives for a possible reconstruction. From the point of view of a theoretical and institutional re-foundation of democratic regimes, degrowth calls for a philosophical acknowledgement of ecological and social limits, in terms of the institution of a new socio-environmental public sphere which can lead to new constituent processes and to the invention of new deliberative arenas, accordingly introducing different space and time criteria, if compared to the ones we are used to.

Property Developers and Urban Adaptation: Conceptual and Empirical Perspectives on Governance

Adaptation to climate change in urban areas requires public and private actors to engage in governance of complex problems in conditions of uncertainty. The property development ‘industry’ consists of diverse private actors with considerable financial, political or technical resources. However, there is no empirical research to date on the potential contribution of these actors, and particularly property developers, to climate adaptation, in terms of their preferences, capabilities and perceptions. This article reports on findings from a survey of, and discussions with, Australian property developers, their representative industry bodies, and technical and advisory service providers to developers. Amongst other themes, we focus here on: participation and capacity; effectiveness of current polices; risks and opportunities; and cost-sharing considerations as perceived by these groups. Results indicate that developers and their interest groups are seeking greater levels of participation and joint decision-making in public-adaptation policy and its implementation. The results also suggest that while developers and their service providers recognise a shift towards greater levels of responsibility and cost sharing for adaptation, perceptions of operational ambiguities and financial risks hinder progress in this area. Given this, the authors point to the need to further examine the potential of new deliberative arenas that can balance and complement existing regulatory controls in the governance of urban adaptation.