When Citizens Decide
When Citizens Decide: the Challenges of Large Scale Public Engagement
Conference 1-2 May 2008
British Columbia was the home tothe first Citizens’ Assembly designed to fully engage individual citizens indiscussing and making significant public policy decisions. The success of the BritishColumbia Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform led both the Netherlands andthen the province of Ontario to draw on that experience and replicate theAssembly process.
To measure andassess the success of this widely hailed democratic innovation the Centre helda major international conference - When Citizens Decide: The Challenge of LargeScale Public Engagement – that compared the three Assemblies and explored the terms under whichsimilar citizen engagement exercises might contribute to improved democraticdecision-making. The conference was organized by the Centre’s Amy Lang and KenCarty. One of its highlights was a session featuring the three distinguishedChairs of the respective Assemblies discussing the challenges of leading thosecitizen engagement processes.
The conference drew a lively audience from Canada, the United States, Europe and New Zealand and included academics,policy practitioners, members of the NGO community, interested citizens and anumber of students. During the meeting Mark Warren and Hilary Pearse’s book (onthe BC Assembly) Designing Deliberative Democracy was launched to wide acclaim. The conference wasrecorded and so is available to the public in both webcast and DVD versions.
Several of the conference presentations fromacademic researchers will constitute the central chapters of a book entitled When Citizens Decide: Lessons from Citizens’Assemblies on Electoral Reform by Ken Carty (UBC), Andre Blais &Patrick Fournier (Montreal), Jonathan Rose (Queen’s) and Henk van der Kolk(Twente – Netherlands) to be published next year by Oxford University Press. Itis particularly concerned with how ordinary citizens came to differentdecisions on an issue, such as changing the electoral system, given their lackof much previous knowledge or interest in the subject.
A second majorstudy in this are is being conducted by Amy Lang who is preparing a bookexamining the workings of the Ontario and British Columbia Assemblies asmechanisms for engaging citizens in a meaningful way. Dr. Lang observed allaspects of the Assemblies and her analysis will draw on an extensive set ofintensive interviews with the citizen participants themselves.
Conference program in PDF format
Videos of the conference sessions will be hosted by Google Video. We will create a link to each session video as soon as it is available online.
Click on the links to watch each session.
Session 1: Leadership in the BC, Dutch and Ontario Citizens Assemblies
Session 2: Three Citizens' Assemblies: What Worked & What Didn't?
Session 3: The Contribution of the Citizens' Assemblies
Session 4: Large Scale Public Engagement: Problems & Prospects
Session 5: From Mini-Public to Public Sphere
Session 6: How well does the Citizens' Assembly Model travel to other policy areas? (Soon to be uploaded).
Some presenters have made their presentations or speaking notes available for posting on this website in PDF format:
Julia Abelson Using Citizens’ Assemblies in Other Policy Arenas: The Case of Health Care
André Blais Did the Participants Decide by Themselves?
Ned Crosby Ready for the Big One?
Susanna Haas Lyons Leveraging the Media to Accelerate Public Engagement Outcomes
Mary Pat McKinnon Citizens’ Assemblies and Climate Change (speaking notes)
Peter MacLeod Concluding Remarks
