Democracy in Practice Series: International Perspectives on Citizen Engagement (TRN4-V55)

Transcript: Democracy in Practice Series: International Perspectives on Citizen Engagement

[00:00:00 Animated CSPS logo appears. Text on screen: Webcast]

[00:00:05 Fraser Valentine appears full screen. Text on screen: Fraser Valentine, Faculty Member, Canada School of Public Service]

Fraser Valentine: Hello, and welcome, everybody, to today's event, International Perspectives on Citizen Engagement. My name is Fraser Valentine, and I'm a faculty member here at the Canada School of the Public Service, and I'm very happy to be moderating today's event. Before I go any further, I'd like to acknowledge that I'm speaking to you from the traditional unceded territory of the Algonquin Anishinaabe people. I want to express my gratitude to generations of Algonquin people, past and present, as the original caretakers of the space that I currently occupy. I recognize that we have folks from across the country among us today, so I'd encourage you all to take a moment and think about the territory that you're currently occupying.

To begin, I'd like to offer a bit of context and a little bit of a slice of Canadian history. Electoral reform, as many of you will know, has been a reoccurring topic of debate in Canada, with various provinces exploring ways to make their voting systems more representative and more effective. British Columbia took a pretty bold step in this direction in the early 2000s.

In 2001, the British Columbia Liberal Party proposed creating a Citizen Assembly on electoral reform as part of its election platform. This was in response to growing dissatisfaction with the province's electoral system. They went on to win that election, and after forming government, they passed legislation, in May of 2003, that officially established the Assembly. It was composed of 160 randomly selected citizens from across the province, and their role was to study, evaluate, and propose possible reforms to the province's electoral system. After a year of deliberation, the assembly recommended adopting a single transferable vote approach. Although this recommendation did not pass a public referendum, it did spark significant discussions on electoral reform, and it inspired similar democratic initiatives worldwide. In fact, the OECD later praised the BC Citizen Assembly for pioneering a deliberative wave in governance. Two decades later, this legacy continues, and it continues to influence democratic practices, demonstrating the lasting impact of involving citizens directly in governance. And that brings us to today.

We're joined today by experts from Ireland, Colombia, and Belgium to explore how Citizen Assemblies, and a broader public engagement, can drive democratic innovation. Our panelists will share their experiences, highlighting both the challenges and the successes of involving citizens in decision making. They're also going to discuss key lessons from their countries that could help strengthen democracy in Canada.

Following the presentations, we'll have a panel discussion, which will be followed by questions from the audience. I would encourage you all to submit your questions to the panelists using the webcast interface. Just click the chat function located at the top right corner of your screen and submit your question in the language of your choice, and we will get to as many as we can with the time that we have.

Without further ado, let me introduce you to our speakers.

[00:03:25 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: First, we have Seána Glennon. She's a postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Ottawa Public Law Centre, funded by the Underwritten Constitutional Norms and Principles Projects, which examines underwritten constitutional norms and principles in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Germany. Her doctoral research explored how citizen deliberation shapes constitutional legislative reforms with a focus on innovative institutions like Citizen Assemblies that make these processes much more inclusive and more effective. Seána also has a practice as a lawyer at an international law firm in Dublin, specializing in public and administrative law, and she's qualified as a solicitor in Ireland, England, and Wales. Felipe Rey is a professor of constitutional law at the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogotá, Colombia, as well as the founder of the Democratic Innovation Laboratory, iDeemos. He's also the co-lead of the international network, Democracy R&D, and the creator of the Itinerate Citizens' Assembly Model, the first model from the Global South to be recognized by the OECD as an alternate approach to institutionalizing citizen participation.

Yves Dejaeghere is the Executive Director at the Federation for Innovation and Democracy Europe and has worked as a Senior Researcher in Political Science at KU Leuven, and the University of Antwerp, as well as a Visiting Researcher at the University of Oxford. He has acted as an expert for the European Court of Auditors, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the European Commission, the Council of Europe, and the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, as well as a number of local, regional, and national governments.

So, let me begin by thanking all of you for joining us today. And with that, I'll turn the floor over to Yves, who will be our first speaker. Yves.

Yves Dejaeghere: Just as a small – Fraser, I think Seána was going to start off.

Fraser Valentine: Sorry. Seána.

Seána Glennon: That's okay. Thank you so much, Fraser. Thank you to my fellow panelists, and I'm thrilled to be here and to have received the invitation to this very timely and important event. Fraser, will you give me a quick thumbs up that you can hear me still? Great. Super. So, let's get straight into it. There has been so much media attention and academic literature that has been dedicated in the past few years to the problems that our democracies are facing.

[00:06:03 Seána Glennon appears full screen. Text on screen: Seána Glennon, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in Constitutional Law, University of Ottawa]

Seána Glennon: So, we hear about democratic fatigue, democratic malaise, even democratic decay. And in some parts of the world, we do see a rise in authoritarianism, but we also see a more subtle trend, even in well-established democracies, and that is a distrust of ordinary citizens of their elected institutions.

Now, this can all paint a very bleak picture of the state of democracy, but it's important to know democracies are not standing still. Over the past decade, or more than a decade, we see the rise in many different countries around the world of democratic innovations that seek to engage ordinary citizens to play a meaningful role as active players in legal and policy and constitutional reform.

Ireland is one country that has really been a world leader in using citizen-centred innovations in the form of Citizens' Assemblies to empower citizens to have an impact on, how do we change our laws. Interestingly, the Irish experience was very much inspired by the Canadian experience of having Citizens' Assemblies on electoral reform that Fraser mentioned in the introduction.

So, when we talk about Citizens' Assemblies, which are a form of deliberative mini-public, what do we mean? What are these bodies? Essentially, they usually consist of a representative sample of ordinary citizens who are chosen by lot, who deliberate together and make proposals for legal or policy reform. And the idea behind them is to make our democracy more deliberative. It's all about this idea of a deliberative democracy.

And the idea behind deliberative democracy, and there's a whole bunch of literature behind it, but broadly, the idea of it is that our collective decisions are legitimate to the extent that those affected by those decisions, us ordinary people, have the right and the capacity and the opportunity to participate in deliberating on the content of those decisions.

So, this can all sound very abstract, these deliberative mini-publics and deliberative democracy and these concepts about innovations, so I'm going to try and make it a little bit more concrete by telling you the story of a very consequential legal reform that we had in Ireland, which engaged ordinary citizens through a Citizens' Assembly and allowed a Citizens' Assembly to have a really impactful role. And that is the reform of our law on abortion.

Now, in order to tell you this story, I need to give you a little bit of background on Irish abortion law. In the early 1980s, the Irish people voted by way of a referendum to insert a new provision into our Constitution, commonly referred to as the eighth Amendment. The eighth Amendment provided for a right to life of the unborn. Ireland was actually the first country in the world to include constitutional protection for the unborn in its written Constitution. Now, this provision, the eighth Amendment, didn't say anything specifically about abortion, but it operated as a near blanket ban on abortion in almost all but the most extreme circumstances. The law was applied very restrictively. It was interpreted fairly restrictively by the courts.

And while the intention behind this constitutional provision may have been to prevent abortion from happening in Ireland altogether, of course, it did occur. And tens of thousands of women traveled to the UK or to other jurisdictions over the following decades to obtain abortion services. Other women who couldn't afford to travel, or for various reasons who couldn't travel, carried unwanted pregnancies to term. And in more recent years, people also resorted to the importation of illegal abortion pills.

Now, there had been momentum slowly building for a change in the law, and a number of tragic cases really illustrated how restrictive the law was. But matters really came to a head, in 2012, with the death of a young pregnant woman named Savita Halappanavar. Now, her death was widely blamed on the chilling effect of the eighth Amendment on medical practitioners, and the investigation into her death found that doctors had hesitated to intervene because she had a fetal heartbeat, and she ultimately died of sepsis.

Now, this caused widespread protests across Ireland. Thousands of people came out to protest. And while abortion had been a fairly politically toxic issue in Ireland, and elected representatives had delayed having to deal with it, the protests that followed the death of Savita Halappanavar really made it impossible for politicians to put it back anymore.

So, while over the years, there had been various expert groups and parliamentary committees and different forums that had tried to look at the abortion issue, none of them had really managed to come to a consensus on how to move forward, so the government took a new, novel approach. It established a Citizens' Assembly in 2016 to examine this issue of abortion once and for all.

So, what was the Citizens' Assembly? Well, it consisted of a group of 99 ordinary citizens who were intended to be broadly representative of Irish society, based on gender, age, geographical region, and socio-economic background. The government appointed a Chairperson for the Citizens' Assembly, who was a retired Supreme Court Judge. She had a small Secretariat, a staff, from the Department of the Taoiseach, the Prime Minister's Office, to help her in pulling it together. And she also had an expert advisory group which consisted of legal and medical and ethics experts. Several decisions had to be made at the outset by the Chair and the Secretariat about how to actually run this process. This isn't something that had been done before. And because it was about abortion and this was a polarizing topic, the spotlight was on this process. So, first of all, when we gather citizens together to deliberate, how do we equip them with the knowledge they need to be able to effectively deliberate? So, an important decision made by the Chair at the outset, was that she would invite a group of experts to present to the citizens on the legal and medical position, but she would choose experts that had not previously expressed an opinion publicly about abortion, so she would attempt to give the citizens a neutral grounding in the law and policy around abortion. After that, civil society groups were invited to present to the citizens as well, and the citizens also had an opportunity to say who they wanted to hear from as they went through their deliberations.

The citizens also were given quite a lot of ownership of the process, so they weren't just passive recipients of information. One important feedback that the citizens gave is that they wanted to hear directly from people who had been affected by the law. This hadn't been included in the agenda for the Citizens' Assembly to begin with. But following that feedback from the citizens, the Chair invited women who had lived experience of the implications of the eighth Amendment to come and speak directly to the Citizens' Assembly with their views.

At the end of the process, the citizens had an opportunity to vote on their recommendations, and again, the citizens had a lot of ownership in this process. The idea was not to achieve a consensus that they could all agree on, but to formulate ballots so that the citizens could ensure that they were happy that the option that they wanted to go for was reflected on the ballot.

So, what was the output of this process? Well, the citizens recommended taking the eighth Amendment out of the Constitution, replacing it with a new constitutional provision that would allow Parliament to legislate for abortion for the first time. They also went a little further. As well as that constitutional recommendation, they provided a detailed statutory framework on how abortion should be legislated for in Ireland, and it was built around this idea of an unrestricted right of access to abortion for the first time in Ireland within the first 12 weeks of gestation. So, it wouldn't be a reasons-based access, and much of the discourse in the run-up to the Citizens' Assembly had been about the hard cases, so where there's a fetal abnormality or where the pregnancy is posing a risk to health. Actually, the citizens said, we need to have an unrestricted right of access.

The recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly were then passed to a cross-party parliamentary committee, which really took the Citizens' Assembly's report as its blueprint. It scrutinized the law, and it largely, not universally, but largely endorsed the recommendations of the Citizens' Assembly, including this rather radical 12-week recommendation. And that committee then in turn reported to the government.

The government then decided that it would put a referendum to the people of Ireland and undertook that if the people voted in favour of taking away the eighth Amendment, that it would legislate for abortion along the lines of what the Citizens' Assembly had recommended. So, the Citizens' Assembly is playing this agenda-setting role as the government sets out to reform the law.

So, coming to the end of my time, and in the last minute, I just want to wrap up with some lessons. What can we take from this very striking instance of citizen deliberation? Well, first, I think what this case study shows us, it provides with evidence, if evidence were needed, that citizens really are capable of deliberating on very complex topics, even polarizing topics, that have proved intractable through the existing process. They can produce not just high-level, high constitutional recommendations on values, they can actually produce concrete technical recommendations for how to change a policy or law. I think that was also reflected in the Canadian case, where citizens grappled with a really complex area of electoral reform and came up with concrete recommendations.

The second lesson I would draw from this is that institutional design is key. It's all very well to put citizens in a room and have them do a brilliant deliberative process, but if there isn't a way to connect that to the empowered political actors, then that's all it is. It's just an exercise of deliberation. It's not really setting the path forward for policymakers to make a change.

And the final thing, while I think I've presented quite an optimistic view on the role of citizens in legal reforms, I think it's important to say that Citizens' Assemblies are not a panacea. They are not going to be the cure to all our democratic woes. And, in particular, the Irish experience, I think, teaches us that Citizens' Assemblies on their own are not going to create a consensus in society about how to tackle a really difficult issue.

Sometimes in the international media, the Irish case is presented as this very simple story of abortion was this terribly difficult issue, and the Citizens' Assembly solved it. In fact, what we know is consensus had been building in Ireland for a long time before the Citizens' Assembly that something needed to be done. However, what the Citizens' Assembly did that was really special was it transformed that consensus into a tangible legal framework that elected policymakers could then take and use as a basis to achieve a really striking legal change that had proved almost impossible to achieve in the run up to that.

So, I think I'm just at the end of my time. I'll leave it there and turn to the other panelists, and I look forward to discussing in the question time.

[00:17:30 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Thanks a lot, Seána. I have a lot of questions. It's such a fascinating case. So, are we going to Felipe second? Yes, excellent. Over to you, Felipe.

Felipe Rey: Thank you, Fraser. Thank you. Thank you very much, Seána, it was very interesting to listen to this Irish case. Well, I will start by thanking the School of Public Service of Canada for this invitation, and of course, thanking all of you for being here.

[00:18:05 Felipe Rey appears full screen. Text on screen: Felipe Rey, Professor of Constitutional Law, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana]

Felipe Rey: I would like to start, I will try to count my time here, again, with a very basic definition of what a Citizens' Assembly is. As Seána was saying, a Citizens' Assembly could be defined as a group of randomly selected citizens who come together over a period of weeks, or months, to learn about a policy issue and deliver it with the assistance of facilitators and ultimately develop a policy recommendation.

So, I would like to rebut some myths in the field of deliberative democracy. I will focus my presentation in rebutting some myths. The first one, one common myth, is that a deliberative democracy is somehow an academic or theoretical project. That's only partially true. It's true that deliberative democracy gained traction in universities during the '80s. It's hard to accept, but the '80s is almost 50 years ago. It's incredible that since the turn of this century, deliberative democracy has entered a completely new phase of institutional development with the rise of Citizens' Assemblies and democratic innovation.

So, one first reflection I would like to suggest, to propose, is that we think about the concept of an assembly. What images of assemblies do we have come to our mind? We could think, for example, in the 18th century, of the founding fathers of the United States, for example. All wise, but also all men, all white. Contemporary assemblies have improved largely somewhat in terms of inclusion. For example, if you think in the Chilean Constitutional Convention, one of its requisites was that it needed to have complete perfect parity between women and men. But even, for example, the Colombian Constitutional Convention that did our Constitution in 1991 only had four women out of more than 70 delegates.

So, you can see how the notion of what an assembly is has been changing over the last centuries. The British Columbia Assembly and other Citizens' Assemblies you just heard about represent a different kind of assembly, one that is not elected, but still is democratic. I want to explain this. I want to go deeper in this argument. Let me explain why a Citizens' Assembly is democratic.

Of course, many reasons have been given. Some people say it is inclusive because it allows everyone to have a chance to participate. It is diverse because it forms a microcosm of the general population in terms of gender, age, geography. It is deliberative because discussions are carefully facilitated to ensure a thoughtful engagement.

I know what you might be thinking in terms of inclusion. People say, well, in terms of inclusion, a Citizens' Assembly is just a body of 100 people. What could be the democratic credential of a political body of 100 people in a society or a city, for example, like Bogotá, with 8 million, or Colombia, with more than 40 million? Well, remember that it's not just the members of the assembly. It's all the people who were contacted to be part of the assembly. Let me give you an example. In a recent assembly I participated in, more than 50,000 people were initially contacted, leading to the final selection of just 70 members. So, when we talk about Citizens' Assemblies, the impact is not just about the members themselves, but also about the many citizens who had the opportunity to engage in the process. I'll go back to the democratic credentials of Citizens' Assemblies. I want to offer another reason why I believe that Citizens' Assemblies are democratic, and this reason and this argument connects directly to your own work in the Public Service in Canada.

I think that Citizens' Assemblies are democratic because they embody the democratic ideal of civic friendship. As a renowned democratic theorist, Jane Mansbridge, who is a professor at Harvard, reminded us 40 years ago, democracy needs two kinds of institutions to survive: institutions for conflict, and institutions for friendship.

The problem is that institutions for conflict are well known. We have electoral bodies, we have parliament, we have the press, and more recently, we have social networks. The thing is that these institutions channel and, unfortunately, they also create new disagreement and competition. One of the problems I believe we have with our democracies is that we have many of these conflict institutions, and they are making our political conflict even worse day by day. As I was saying, democracy also requires institutions, political institutions, that remind citizens that they are, in some sense, also partners in a shared political project. I think that Citizens' Assemblies serve precisely that function also. Citizens' Assemblies help citizens recognize that the common good exists, or that at least it is worth striving for. It shows that we can reach reasonable agreements and that politics doesn't have to be this chaotic and divisive arena that electoral politics often reflects.

I think that you, as public servants, are deeply familiar with another institution that serves this same purpose in our democracies, and it's the public service. A well-functioning public service, like Canada's, is precisely designed to remind citizens that regardless of which party they vote for, their public administration will be run by competent and independent professionals committed to serving the public interest.

I believe that we need to broaden our understanding of political representation, and we need to recognize that a representative government allows, and should allow, citizens to be represented in multiple ways by a diversity of political actors. This is why I think electoral representation can be complemented by the inclusion of randomly selected citizens in political bodies.

The world of representation has always evolved. It has never been static. For example, in the 18th century, you didn't have political parties. They emerged only in the 19th century as part of our representative governments. Over time, new forms of representation have continued to appear. Think of social movements, think of labour unions, civic associations in our century, 21st century. We have influencers, we have digital activists that also have become part of the political landscape. I think that we have to be more open when we think about the institutions that can represent other citizens and I think that Citizens' Assemblies are, as well, another option.

We'll end this short presentation by referring to another myth that I think that populates the field, and it's that primarily deliberative practice is North based. It's something that happens in Europe, or in Canada, or in the very rich countries, and that's simply not the case. In recent years, we've seen remarkable examples of high-quality deliberation using sortition in places like Bogotá, where I live, in Brazil, in Chile and Mongolia, and often with very significant innovations. I will mention three of them.

First, sequenced models of deliberation, where a Citizens' Assembly is not just one moment of deliberation, but deliberation unfolds across different stages and moments with different groups of randomly selected citizens. This is the philosophy of the Itinerant Citizens' Assembly model. Another example is meta-deliberation. Meta-deliberation is a democratic innovation, specifically conceived for the design of further Citizens' Assemblies. Usually, Citizens' Assemblies are designed by politicians or public servants. Well, maybe we can have citizens to design them as well, to pick, for example, the governance system; how many citizens are going to be part of the assemblies; what is going to be the impact, and so forth.

Another example developing in the Global South is in-person recruitment. Well, what do you do when you don't have enough information, enough data, to do the selection process? So, you can first do in-person recruitment. You can go out to the streets and ask people to sign, and then you can conform your own base of, say, 20,000 people and do the dissertation process with those 20,000 initial people.

So, these are three examples. And, of course, I look forward to the discussion, maybe to discuss about some of them. Thank you very much, Fraser.

[00:28:48 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Thanks, Felipe. I really want to ask you a question, but I'm not going to. I'll turn it over to Yves, and then we'll get to our questions and our discussion. Yves, please.

Yves Dejaeghere: Good evening, for me, from Brussels. We're a few hours ahead here. And thank you for inviting me to this interesting talk, and thanks to the two other speakers. So, I think we've been a bit introduced to the concept of the deliberative democracy and Citizens' Assemblies by Seána and Felipe,

[00:18:05 Yves Dejaeghere appears full screen. Text on screen: Yves Dejaeghere, Executive Director, Federation for Innovation in Democracy - Europe]

Yves Dejaeghere: so I want to address a bit how in Europe, this deliberative wave, and you've used this word Fraser, which was actually coined by a Canadian, Peter MacLeod. This deliberative wave is really taking some shape, and we can see some trends emerging. I just want to point at three things.

The role of climate assemblies in that deliberative wave. There have been many with those. They have been a big part of this. Actually, the combination of climate movement and Citizen Assemblies has carried this wave, whereas almost 50% of the hundreds of assemblies we've seen at all levels in Europe have been on some climate topics. European deliberation, where I'm sitting a few hundred metres from the European Parliament and the European Commission. How do you do this with 27 countries and 27 languages? Then what Felipe already touched upon, we see the advent of permanent assemblies.

If I first touch on the climate assemblies, we've seen a really big surge in climate assemblies in the last few years. There are a few reasons you can point at. The first one is a bit like the Irish have their abortion and gay marriage assemblies, which were very, very visible, the French, on instigation of President Macron, had a Convention pour le Climat, [inaudible] It was really the equivalent of this Irish Citizen Assembly on Abortion.

It was very visible, I think, even more, and Seána, correct me if I'm wrong, but even more than the Irish, actually, even the assembly members were present in the press. This was very debated in the media. It had a very high visibility, which very often is a problem for Citizen Assemblies, because media find them very boring. The thing is, of course, this came after the gilet jaune protests, and I don't know how far this reached Canada, but you had a period of serious social upheaval. Of course, this assembly coming after this, and this is similar to the Irish case, of course, draws attention to this as a conflict resolution assembly.

But so, whilst the results have been debated of this, this created a very visible assembly on climate, and it was a model that inspired – we've seen climate Citizen Assemblies in Denmark, Austria, Scotland. Ireland had one on biodiversity, not climate as such, and also one on climate in the initial ones. Catalonia, several regions have really done climate assemblies.

Now, at the city level, you've seen dozens of these, too. These were very much – and I'm talking to civil servants – were actually inspired by EU regulation, very often, or national regulation that forced cities to make climate plans. And climate plans needed to involve citizens. And this is, of course, very often a bit of, we need to involve citizens here. And climate assemblies became a bit of a model to solve involve that conundrum, where you had to make a long-term plan that's [inaudible], but you had to involve citizens.

I think the EU has also been a bit instrumental in that by actually freeing up resources, because it's something we haven't talked about yet. This is, of course, not more expensive than, let's say, organizing an election that also costs millions and millions, but it's something new. So suddenly new budgets need to be found for this. As Felipe already said, you need to find registers, send out invitations, you need facilitation. And so, on the climate, there has been some funding, both the EU has set up some projects, not for all local authorities, but a few. And this has driven some of these climate assemblies at the local level, but also a very big foundation, like the European Climate Foundation has been very instrumental in supporting this with resources, knowledge, setting up a website for civil servants where they could find resources on this, but also practitioners.

So, these climate assemblies have really had a moment. What we now see is that the results have been a bit mitigated, especially at the national level, because these are very broad topics. And some of the lessons learned have been to maybe narrow these down a bit because, of course, very broad topics lead to very wide results. And this can lead to, whether it's the impression or the actual cherry picking by governments, I leave in between for all the research on these individual assemblies, but at least that impression has been created.

Of course, narrower topics can be very broad, as Seána said. The abortion one wasn't a yes, no. It's never a yes/no case, but it really allows citizens to narrow down a specific topic and really make targeted recommendations. But of course, that makes it much less easy for politicians to then navigate. Now we see that the second generation of these climate assemblies are mostly targeting one question or picking a topic out of the broader climate question.

The second thing I wanted to touch upon on in my 10 minutes is European deliberation. It's not really a trend because it's really specific to the European institutions, but it's something pretty unique because it's really organized by an international institution as input to its policies. And again, we can debate how far that input goes. But what we've seen after some trials in 2016, 2017, 2018, with three countries, four countries, unfortunately in COVID times, but that wasn't foreseen, the European Union announced the conference on the Future of Europe. And this was a vast project, including other things. But it also includes included four Citizen Assemblies of each 200 people that were sourced from all different European Nation States. This was a vast undertaking and also a bit of a challenge.

And what we saw there is that this works. How far you can entrench it into the institution, Seána touched upon this. You can do this. Then the question is, how far does it become policy or is it entrenched? But those 800 citizens in total, and one of the meetings was in Dublin Castle, if I'm right, really across those countries, across languages, actually came to sensible recommendations. Some research even points that, and I know Canada is a multilingual country, that sometimes deliberation across languages can have a higher deliberative quality in some cases because you have to pause and listen before you react, so it puts a bit of the brakes on.

So, what has followed from that is that the European Commission is now doing European Citizen Panels. And there is one on the upcoming European budget that starts next weekend, I think this is number five, so this has really become something which the European Commission does as part of the preparatory legislative work. I will say, some people say that the impact is not enough, but every assembly has come from, very often, a first smaller assembly project that then slowly grows. As long as there is ambition, I think this is an amazing evolution. I've observed some of these assemblies, and you can see the Italian – because they start at 16 – an Italian 17-year-old boy, who put on a white suit, sitting there with the 80-year-old German person, and they talk about a common European project. It is really amazing, sometimes, to see.

Then finally, and this is what Felipe already pointed at, we see some places now going towards permanent assemblies. Because, of course, if these things work once, this begs the question, then why don't you do it several times? The Irish, for example, do it several times. It's not yet a legal requirement. They've taken this up as, let's say, a regular tradition, but it is still requiring the Prime Minister to take this on.

We now see a number of places that either, put in place legislation where this becomes a right, for example, a number of signatures can call a Citizens' Assembly, such as in Brussels, the Brussels Regional Parliament, or other places like Copenhagen, Milan, Paris, where the city itself organizes this on a regular basis. For example, the city of Paris has a permanent Citizen Assembly. Copenhagen has an institutionalized one on climate, specifically, that now will run for three years. Milan has one.

I think the most far-going example is the German-speaking community in this country, which is a federal country. And so, the German speakers, we have a small German-speaking community, minority, but they have their own parliament, and they have a law obligating the parliament, at least once a year, to hold a Citizen Assembly. And because this is institutionalized, this brings up a few new questions such as agenda setting and follow-up. If you do this regularly, who decides on the topics, for example?

This German-speaking community, briefly called Ostbelgien, they're in the east, for example, have a separate citizen body, a standing body of citizens that don't deliberate on the recommendations, but they choose the topics. They also see if the parliament does the follow-up. And so, there's a real entrenchment.

Finally, what is interesting for talking to civil servants, what you see this also slowly builds in all levels of the administration, a having to work with this body. So just to give you one example, and then I'll round it off because I see I'm at 10 minutes, is citizens can propose topics, and every cycle they propose topics, but it's up to the administration to then see, does this actually fit what this parliament can do? Because it has no sense to deliberate on something they can't do. And so, they have to write replies to the citizens who propose the topics. And so slowly they've learned that you don't write a technical, very Article 7, blah, blah, blah. You need to write some – this created a new capacity in – they also provide resources for these assemblies, and so the administration slowly had to build a citizen-leaned perspective to engage with this new body. So, it also created new resources and new ways of thinking working within the administration. So, this is a bit, my recap for the 10 minutes, but happy to look forward to the discussion and questions.

[00:40:38 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Thanks, Yves. I was saying to the organizers at the School when we were discussing the panel, it's such a great group of countries. It's such an interesting group of countries to be all leveraging this tool. But you can see in all your talks how the context really matters, in the sense of how they operate.

Maybe I'll just remind everybody who are listening to please submit your questions. If you'd like to get in on the conversation, just click the submit button up in the top right corner, and you can submit that question in the language of your choice, and we'll get to them all.

To start us off, I have three related questions. Some of them are also just clarification things. The first is about assemblies themselves, because I was quite struck that they can be temporary and targeted, or there's this permanent feature. I'm wondering, is one better than the other, or do we know yet? I think of the Irish case, a very clear, not narrow focus, and the outcome is very concrete with respect to the policy trajectory of it. But if they become permanent, then does their impact – is it more diffuse? And is that okay?

Why don't we start with Seána? We'll just go around.

Seána Glennon: Sure. This is a really interesting question because when we talk about these kinds of forums, we're talking about empowerment, and it may not seem very empowering, if government always has the discretion as to what the topics are that will be deliberated and when they will be deliberated upon.

Now, in the Irish case, we have had this ad hoc series. I talked about the Abortion Citizens' Assembly, but we've had several other ones, too. The first one we had was in 2012. It was called the Convention on the Constitution. That was slightly interesting because it was a hybrid Citizens' Assembly. It included both ordinary citizens and elected representatives as well, all together in the same assembly. And that assembly had a list of topics that it was given by the government, but it also had the discretion at the end to deliberate on any other issues that you see fit.

[00:43:00 Seána Glennon appears full screen.]

Seána Glennon: And that particular assembly came up with socioeconomic rights, should they be protected in our Constitution? And took the view that, yes, they should be. Now, the government didn't have any appetite to put some sort of justiciable obligation on itself into the Constitution that would require it to expend money on certain things.

So, what ended up happening? This idea just was kicked on and kicked back and forth for the following few years. It's been constantly in the public discourse, and I think that's another service that Citizens' Assemblies can do. They can shine a light on matters. But I do think you've identified, Fraser, if there isn't an appetite on the part of empowered decision makers to go forward with something that Citizens' Assemblies have put out there, then sometimes those recommendations can hit a dead end. And Ireland has this reputation of employing these deliberative practices, but we do have quite a few Citizen Assembly recommendations over the past decade that have actually sat there and not much has come from them.

I don't know, maybe, Yves, if you have views on the merits of the system, the Ostbelgien system that you described, where citizens actually have this ability to set the agenda for other Citizens' Assemblies and whether that's a more empowering model.

[00:44:20 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Yves Dejaeghere: I think Fraser hit a point. There's very much context in these things. What I think, what you've seen in Ostbelgien is that, over the last five years that they've done this, there's also an appreciation from political parties to get this input because it enriches their policymaking.

[00:44:43 Yves Dejaeghere appears full screen.]

Yves Dejaeghere: They, after one legislature, they made an amended law, so they amended the original project. One of the things they put in was that this citizen body that picks a topic, would have to pick at least one topic coming from the parties. But they put in that the Bureau of Parliament has to decide this, and they need to do it in consensus. The reason they did this, if you see this not as an adverse body of politics, and this is what Felipe has said, we also need to think of politics as not always fighting.

The idea for the politicians was, well, sometimes they come up with something like you say, Seána, that we just close the policy cycle on, for example. But sometimes we have to say no, because these are not good recommendations, but we're not in a policy cycle. We just closed something. We just did a big educational bill. And they say, sometimes we're working on something, and we want this input now, but we can't touch it because it's citizen agenda setting. One of the things I think is often misunderstood about assemblies is, these are recommendations, so they don't force. Politicians can say no, but what we do have to do is set the bar as high as possible to say no. This is about accountability. And so, for example, what I think Ostbelgien does show on that end is there are three moments where politics has to reply to these recommendations, and they include written replies, article by article.

And so, the government can say, no, we can't afford this, or we would have to close the hospital to do this. And what we see is that citizens actually take a no. They're very adult about this, but they want to be taken seriously. So, if you discard the recommendations, or you don't reply to them, but if you treat them in a mature way and you explain, very often citizens will accept. We see this in Ostbelgien. They will accept. If you, of course, constantly say no to everything, you have to wonder why you're actually organizing this, then you're making a mockery of what you've self-put in place. There needs to be a balance, but there's no golden rules.

Maybe, Felipe, you want to add something to that.

[00:46:55 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Felipe Rey: Sure. I really agree with you both. I have maybe two comments here. One is we have to consider the dimension of time in democratic innovation and the life of institutions. The life of institutions is much longer than the life of individuals.

[00:47:18 Felipe Rey appears full screen.]

Felipe Rey: The life of institutions is counted in centuries. If you think about parliaments, if you think about courts, if you think about even the presidents, for example, 200 years, then only 20 years of institutional evolution is a short period of time. We need to recognize that. We need to recognize that we are in a moment in which we are experiencing, we are learning. But I think that the future of Citizens' Assemblies, that is at least my desire, is that they will become part of our government systems because I think they will be permanent someday.

And why? I think because the main role that Citizens' Assemblies have is to represent other citizens. That's how I see them. If Citizens' Assemblies weren't representative institutions, then we would have a problem with the democratic criteria that we apply to them because why would 100 people decide on a political issue? But I think that we have good reasons to consider Citizens' Assemblies as representative institutions.

This connects to what Yves was saying. If they are representing somehow other citizens, well, that means that we should take seriously their recommendations that they have some legitimacy argument that support their action. And of course, I think that what we have to think very carefully in the future is, of course, if Citizens' Assemblies are going to part of our representative governments, then we will also have to think what will be the controls that they will have? What will be the balances that they will introduce?  How are we going to visibilize the deliberations? How are we going to control the members and the design of the assembly, and how are we going to democratize all the process?

That's why I think that institutionalization is also important, Fraser, for democratic reasons, because if you institutionalize something, that means that you will have a public conversation, a public debate about how would you like to have this institution? What are the main rules of this institution? This can be discussed constitutionally or legally, but I think that it's important for democratic reasons as well.

[00:49:48 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Yves Dejaeghere: Fraser, it seems we are waiting?

Fraser Valentine: There, I'm back. I completely froze, but I'm back. I heard most of what you said. The joys of technology. So, I'm just going to keep going because I want to make sure we get lots of questions in and they're starting to flow.

But the reason I was asking that first question, let me just say, is my corollary question, and you've answered this implicitly, I think, is, is the emergence of Citizens' Assemblies a demonstration or an outcome that our current democratic institutions are failing? Are they replacing the legislature, for example? From what I've heard from all of you, the answer is no, that they're actually to mature a democracy, to provide another vehicle and institutional framework that allows for genuine deliberative conversations. Is that fair?  Yves?

Yves Dejaeghere: First of all, I think the replacement thesis is really a minority position, and this is often very much debated. But in practitioners, we really are mostly concerned on how that connection is made. But I think I also want to emphasize a more positive view on this. And very often when I do a keynote about this, I have the iPhone, all the different iPhones, behind me.

[00:51:46 Yves Dejaeghere appears full screen.]

Yves Dejaeghere: Humans innovate constantly, and it's not replacing. The new iPhone doesn't take anything out from the previous one, it adds new features to it. And Apple manages to produce 20 new iPhones per year with some new feature that, for those of you who have children, suddenly we need to get this because it's so much better. Our democracy seems to be the option very often in the debate is either you replace, and you throw it out and it's garbage, or.... This is about innovating. Yes, a car with three wheels drives. You can get somewhere, you need to be careful, and you need to make sure it doesn't tip over as your friends to the south are discovering. It's fragile. And so, you can just add something to it and make it more stable.

It doesn't mean the old thing didn't get you anywhere, but there might be some innovation still there.

The debate about we need to throw out the out, it's more, Okay, how can we add things to this, as Felipe rightly said, that maybe make it a bit less, or put a less [inaudible] part in, and you keep the [inaudible] part. I think both things are part of human nature, and how humans make decisions, but I fully agree, and I thank Felipe for this, I always refer to Elinor Ostrom about this. There are many great women, not accidentally, thinkers who have worked on this, is that we need to focus also on issues of cooperation and working together. And human society has plenty of those. But politics very often is about the [inaudible], how we do debate class, but not cooperate class, et cetera. I'll end here before I...

[00:53:30 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Let me get to some of the questions because there's lots coming in. I'm going to ask two together, and we'll just go around again. The first one is, what happens when there's so much public mistrust in experts, like doctors, scientists, for example? How can that affect citizen engagement? Which is interesting given, Seána, your example of they had experts come in and that model that you offered. The second one is related, so maybe feel free to address both. What can be done to prevent targeted propaganda from affecting decisions? So, misinformation. So, why don't we start, Seána, with you?

Seána Glennon: Yes, those are really great, really important questions, and I think they also tie into the earlier question that you asked, Fraser. That is the question about the legitimacy. We still have these conversations about the legitimacy of Citizens' Assemblies. And there are people, there are scholars that have made these criticisms to say, these citizens are not elected and they're not experts, so why should they have any elevated role in policymaking more than anyone else? And I suppose the answer lies, and Felipe talked a little bit about this,

[00:54:34 Seána Glennon appears full screen.]

Seána Glennon: it is the very fact that they are not elected, and they are not experts that are lending them legitimacy. So, the idea is that we get this microcosm of the public together under good conditions and see what they'll come up with if they have the opportunity to deliberate. But the process is very much process dependent.

So, for example, to answer the first question, this question of expert capture, you could have a process that arguably is quite skewed. And there are certain experts that come and present to citizens and they get a one-sided sense of what a particular topic is. And we may say, well, the output of that may have less legitimacy in our eyes than another process that was set up differently. And, in relation to both that and the propaganda piece, I think the answer is transparency.

So, we, as citizens, often we don't have an insight into the backrooms in Parliament where politicians are sitting together and they're hashing out policy details and they're horse trading and they're making deals. Citizens' Assemblies are different because they're designed to be transparent. They're often, like in the Irish example, they are live streamed. The broader public has a chance to give submissions. You can see all of the information, all of the expert testimony that has been presented to the citizens.

And you can criticize decisions. So, in the abortion case, you could criticize every decision the chair made in the experts that were selected. But at least the transparency is there so that you know what happened, you know the reasons why it happened, and you can criticize the output, but you're criticizing from a place of knowledge and empowerment.

So, that's why I think that when we talk about these, they're not universally democracy-enhancing. They have to be process dependent. And I think we learn from each process that we do, and we put those lessons into the next bout. I don't know if Felipe and Yves want to speak more on that.

[00:56:26 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Felipe Rey: Yes, sure. Yes, if I may, I can add some about expertise. Well, first, some models of democratic deliberation, of citizen deliberation, for example, consensus conferences that have been used in Denmark, mainly imply an exchange between randomly selected citizens and experts.

[00:56:50 Felipe Rey appears full screen.]

Felipe Rey: This is an example, a very particular model where the deliberation is among experts and randomly selected citizens and about very technical issues. Citizens listen to experts, they ask questions, they say, hey, but I don't agree with this. What do you think with this? The other expert is saying these other things. This is a very interesting model for this kind of exchange.

But the other thing that I would say is that I think that sometimes, Fraser, citizens are the experts. I really believe in this. I am thinking a lot in unequal context and unequal nations, where inequality is very tough, very high. If you think in this context where elites are completely separated from the people: when elites don't use public services; when they don't use public transportation; where they don't use public health; or they have their own private pension systems. Everything is private, like happens in many different places. Well, I wonder, who is the expert? Who is the expert in how the public services are working, how the busses are working, how the hospitals are working, how the public schools are working?

So, I think that although, usually, citizens are not considered experts because they don't bring scientific knowledge, I think they have a unique perspective, mostly in an equal context, to understand and to discuss about political issues with a unique perspective that you won't find in electoral bodies many times.

I will cite another woman – it is Marion Young. She differentiated between the representation of interests, the representation of opinions, and the representation of perspectives. She said, Men, for example, can represent the interest of women, but they cannot represent the perspectives of women. They can never see the world from the eyes of another different perspective. I think that bringing these perspectives to the table is a very complementary view in our contemporary democracies.

[00:29:27 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: That's very helpful. Really interesting. Yves? Do you want to get in this one?

Yves Dejaeghere: Well, very quick. What I think what you also see, and this is the same in polarized societies, is that actually in the assemblies, a lot of this you realize how media portrays sometimes. I mean, there's a – looking to the south of your border,

[00:59:50 Yves Dejaeghere appears full screen.]

Yves Dejaeghere: and there are some issues which lead to real polarization. And people differ. I've been involved in one in Mostar in Bosnia, a place that had civil war. But actually, citizens are less polarized in the room than you would think. It's very often people outside of the room which are very polarized.

On information, for example, I think part of how we now view this polarize is always this need for balance where we have a climate act, we need somebody anti-climate. What you've seen, for example, a lot of these climate assemblies is that citizens here, look, there is this one guy who can bring this perspective, they can come into the room, but they hear actually there's a consensus, wait, 10 of these say this, and then this is one guy.

I think also in the French assembly, they had fact checkers. The claim was, if you come, anything you say needs to be fact checkable. The citizens could actually rely on students and PhD students in all different science departments that volunteered on this. Go, could you check whether this is true, that we will lose 1 million jobs if we tax? You were put for a challenge. Finally, the targeting. I think I remember Art O'Leary, who was the Irish head of the – well, the administrative head of the Citizen Assembly on abortion. He said, you had some anti-abortion activists who even were thinking of targeting when the citizens were outside of the room or going to the bathroom, or can we approach them? They made clear, look, if you do this, A, citizens can call it out, and you'd be very hard-pressed. But B, we will just not put you in front of the room anymore. You defy our trust, then you've lost your place.

But I'm sitting in a place where I think there's thousands of lobbyists. I'm in the European block. It's, let's say, a one square mile. You have this in DC. I'm surrounded by lobbyists the whole time. They target these MEPs they know. It's always the same people. Whereas with citizens, they're drawn by lot. By the time you could almost have politicians, I mean, even in a worse, you would be at the next batch.

And very often, one of the principles of the OECD on Citizen Assembly is privacy. You don't put the addresses of the citizens drawn by lot. In many cases, you only put the first name, maybe a photo. It is possible. But in the hundreds that I know, and I look at Felipe and Seána, I know very few situations where it portrayed that the lobby has succeeded in pulling this off.

[01:02:41 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: There are a few questions that all relate to mechanics, so to how the assemblies are built. Let me just bundle these ones together.

The first one is around technology. Are there innovative technologies that are being used in Citizen Assemblies, and what's their nature, and how does that look and feel?

One question about, are assemblies randomly selected by the people in government? Could you speak a little bit more about who makes the selection, how citizens could kickstart one, for example. So, an interesting dynamic there between the legislature and the executive, and who sets the agenda.

And, this is more impact, but is there an improvement in public trust from the decisions made by assemblies as compared to those made in the traditional manner?

Then last on accountability. I know this is a bunch, but they're all related. What mechanisms are in place to ensure accountability on the part of the establishment in regard to implementing the recommendations. So, you've touched on this briefly, Seána, but I guess if there are other examples where, in the design, has it ever been the case that they limit the flexibility they have with respect to not moving forward with whatever is recommended?

Why don't we start with you, Yves, this time. We'll go the reverse order.

Yves Dejaeghere: Technology is, in all ways – and we could do a separate webinar – I mean, especially AI is making the rounds now. As in anything you can do in the world now, slap some AI on it. But in some things, it can useful. For example, if citizens debate around tables, one of the things is, of course, this needs to be summarized.

[01:04:34 Yves Dejaeghere appears full screen. Text on screen: Yves Dejaeghere, Executive Director, Federation for Innovation in Democracy - Europe ]

Yves Dejaeghere: Actually, yesterday, I was at the European Committee of the Regions where they did a test with young, elected politicians who deliberated and an AI software kind of summarized their conversation at the end of that. Now that's a very human task. Of course, I'm still very suspicious in how does that summarization happen? What is cut out?

It is, as Felipe said, there are certain perspectives that might not occur a lot but might be really important. A woman saying, well, it's from my perspective, which might, in a model that statistically samples things, take something out. So, technology is there. I think as Seána said in the Irish, especially in the marriage equality and abortion, when there were a lot of submissions from citizens, so they were done electronically. You can set up a platform.

So, there's loads of technology, but the core, what we do see is people meeting face to face really makes a difference. You can do some of it online, but very often after they have first met in real life. Because you should not forget, us, we're public speakers, and Fraser, you're clearly also in this job. But for many people, speaking to people they don't know is something really – especially about opinions and public opinions – it's something they never do. It's something frightening.

Additionally, doing this in an online environment is – the Scottish did their whole Climate Assembly online, and in the end, it cost as much as doing it offline because they needed to support people in such a way, individuals who had never done this, so you had to set up individual trainings on Zoom; have sessions for people who are like, but I'm really fearful about this. Okay, well, you almost had to have, for some people, some individual for every individual to help them and coach them through this. We're so used to Zoom and keyboards, but some people never do this.

So yes, technologies exist. On random selection, we have a paper. I cannot put it in the chat. I have no control. But there's many ways to do this. In Belgium, governments do it, but there's loads of other ways. I'm trying to be very short here. But if you use private contractors, really watch out. They will, of course, then tender for price, and that might sometimes mean that you really miss out on minorities or certain hard-to-reach groups because that requires the most resources to go get them.

Is there an improvement in trust? Yes, in the long run, there will probably be because we see that citizens who are part of this really show high trust levels. People who know of this, show trust levels in this. But it's like Felipe says, things take time. So, changes in human values – as Inglehardt, we're dropping names, for once, I'll name a man – can take decades. We see value changes, but they don't flip in one year. An institution needs to be first known by people, trusted by people, repeat it before you could see strong...

Then accountability, maybe one of the other ones can take it up, because otherwise, I'm going to soup up all the time here. But these were five questions in one, so I'm really...

[01:08:01 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Well, I think if I were to ask one question is, it feels like design is really critical to success. You have to design the thing at the front end, in a deliberative way, with a set of values and principles. And so, are there disruptors? Can technology pose more risks than benefits given its use now? I guess it's that that's the dynamic, I think, that's coming through with the questions. Seána, do you want to go next?

Seána Glennon: Yes, I can say something quick on the technology maybe, because I think Yves comprehensively covered those questions, and I might say something on the accountability piece then. Actually, both questions will be served by one example of something really interesting that happened in Ireland last year.

[01:08:52 Seána Glennon appears full screen. Text on screen: Seána Glennon, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in Constitutional Law, University of Ottawa ]

Seána Glennon: So, in Ireland, we had a Citizens' Assembly on Gender Equality, which began its work right before the pandemic hit. It began, it had its first meeting in person. The pandemic hit, everything stopped, and it did actually an excellent job of incorporating technology to keep going with the Citizens' Assembly. So, training was provided, laptops, headsets were provided to people that didn't have them. If there were older people that were uncomfortable with technology, they were helped. And they ended up being able to carry through and do the entire Citizens' Assembly with the use of technology.

But on the accountability piece, that particular Citizens' Assembly produced many – it produced 45 recommendations on addressing gender inequalities in Ireland – and one of the recommendations related to a constitutional amendment that would put a higher responsibility on government to support people who provide care – the majority of which are women – care in the home, care for older people, care for small children.

And on the accountability piece, this was actually quite a good example, I think, of an iterative process in that the Citizens' Assembly made this recommendation, which, like other cases of citizen deliberation in Ireland, was passed to a parliamentary committee. And that parliamentary committee deliberated, and it produced a version of constitutional wording, and it liaised with government. It went back to the Citizens' Assembly. It talked to civil society actors to put together this form of wording that would really reflect what the Citizens' Assembly wanted to achieve, which was to really recognize the important role that carers play in Irish society.

And then when it came to government to set the referendum question, they decided to set the question very differently, set it in a very watered-down way that government would strive to support care performed in the home. This ended up attracting criticism all across the spectrum, even those civil society groups that had been calling for an amendment like this said, this actually is an inherently sexist provision and doesn't actually do anything to improve conditions for carers. And it failed spectacularly. The people voted by 73% in the referendum to reject this. And some commentators have painted this as the death knell for Citizens' Assembly. They rejected it.

But when you actually look at the process, the Citizens' Assembly came up with a recommendation, and it was very carefully crafted. And the government decided to depart from that without really justifying its reasons for departure. The government minister in question was never able to really articulate, why did you have this whole deliberative process, and then decide to do something different at the end of it? And at the end, the Irish people rejected it. So, I think that's a cautionary tale on the accountability front. It ended up being a decisive failure for the government in getting that across the line.

[01:11:39 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Yes, that's a great example. Felipe, anything from the perspective of the South on this area?

Felipe Rey: I think that about the question, I won't refer to technology, but I can say that you have very important examples worldwide of Citizens' Assemblies in executives, in legislative, other instances of government could have these forms of deliberation.

[01:11:59 Felipe Rey appears full screen. Text on screen: Felipe Rey, Professor of Constitutional Law, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana]

Felipe Rey: For example, think of some independent agencies. Even in some places, constitutional courts could open these types of deliberation on very contentious constitutional issues. They usually organize public audiences, for example, in Colombia. But you could also organize a Citizens' Assembly.

I think, Fraser, the thing is that in the absence of law, when you get elected for Congress, you don't design Congress every year, or every four years. Congress is designed by the Constitution. We don't have that for Citizens' Assembly. As we don't have that, we have to think about how to democratize the design of Citizens' Assemblies. I will go back to the concept of meta-deliberation. I think that this is very useful.

We did, last year in October, a meta-deliberative assembly in Bogotá. It was very short. It was only four days, 70 members. But the thing was that these members discussed not about an issue in the city. They discussed about how they would like the design of a further Citizens' Assembly to be.

That's interesting because you can put in the hands of citizens' decisions, like for example, the governance systems, the rules of the deliberation, and something very important that you mentioned, the impact. What is going to be the impact of a recommendation of Citizens' Assemblies? I think that this can be discussed in advance. And should be.

Fraser Valentine: Yes, interesting. I keep thinking in the Canadian context, we have used in our contemporary history, Royal Commissions to interrogate issues like bilingualism and biculturalism, very famous Royal Commission.

[01:13:54 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: They've fallen out of favour, but there are elements of the same, but what's obviously different is that the citizen composition is the key difference, and you're not really empowering people in the same way. I think that's a really interesting comparison, just in the Canadian context.

I'll ask two other questions together. These are really about impact. How are you determining the success of the Citizen Assembly model? Is it based on whether or not they come up with a policy suggestion, or have there been any studies done on the long-term effects of the implementation of these issues? The short term versus the long term.

Then a related question somebody had is, has there been any impact on voter turnout in a general election in the jurisdictions that have used assemblies? In other words, is it empowering that sense of democracy and having an impact on the franchise?

Felipe, why don't we start with you on this round?

Felipe Rey: Great. Well, I will say something short about impact. I think that sometimes – I've seen this – sometimes we're obsessed with the policy impact that our institutions can have. So, we ask a lot of, what are the decisions that were taken?

[01:15:22 Felipe Rey appears full screen.]

Felipe Rey: What changed exactly? But I think that Citizens' Assembly offer two kinds of impacts, and both of them are very important. One, of course, is a policy impact, an instrumental impact, where you can say, okay, this policy A changed because of the recommendation of this Citizens' Assembly.

But there's also another intrinsic, not instrumental impact, is an intrinsic impact of citizens at large, the whole citizens in a country, seeing a political body that can deliberate in a more pacific manner, in a more reasonable manner, and reach to reasonable agreement. I think that only seeing that independent of the consequences, the policy consequences that that will have, it's hugely important.

It's also important, Fraser, for descriptive representation reasons. I'm very concerned with this. The literature on descriptive representation has focused a lot on the descriptive representation of women, the descriptive representation of young people. But for example, in Colombia, Citizens' Assemblies are very important to represent descriptively the poor people.

The poor people don't have representation in elected bodies. They can vote, of course, but poor people usually don't get to elect bodies because elections are conceived in part for elites to make them a path to power. I also think, in terms of the descriptive representation of the poor, and the people seeing that everyone can pay a public service, that everyone can discuss about public issues. I think that that's very important to promote equality in our democracies, to see that everyone is capable of ruling and to be ruled in turn.

[01:17:29 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: That's really helpful. Seána, do you want to?

Seána Glennon: I think the question about measuring the success of a Citizens' Assembly is a really great question. And I think oftentimes we associate the success or failure of these exercises with whether their recommendations were actually implemented.

[01:17:48 Seána Glennon appears full screen.]

Seána Glennon: So, some people would say the failed citizen deliberation in the Canadian case, it didn't actually end up achieving electoral reform at the end. Or in the case that I just gave you of the Irish for example, on the gender equality, they did this deliberation and those referendums failed. So, does that mean that that was a failure? And I think that if we define success or failure in those implementation terms, we're taking a very narrow view of the part that these deliberative bodies have the potential to play in our democracy.

So, the Canadian experience didn't result in the electoral reform being implemented, but it did show us, it was the world's first Citizens' Assembly of this kind that showed the ability of citizens to engage with these complicated issues, to produce a very competent framework for what reform might look like. And it inspired a whole slew of further deliberative practices, including in Ireland afterwards.

So, there are ways that we could look at that as being a success, too.In the Irish Gender Equality case, we could say, well, we ended up with a failed referendum, but actually it ignited a whole conversation in Ireland about the role of women in society and how we value all of the unpaid labour that many women take on board in the home. I think having public conversations like that, which may set the agenda in time for a further reform down the road, can't be said necessarily to be failure.

And I'm not aware, and perhaps my co-panelists might know of any particular studies on whether citizen deliberation impacts on voter turnout. I would guess that as Citizens' Assemblies, and certainly in the Irish case, as we've had Citizens' Assemblies, the familiarity with those bodies has grown over the years, and there's actually quite good levels of public trust in those institutions in Ireland. And in particular when they've deliberated on very hot button issues, we've seen very high turnouts in some of those referendums.

Now, that's not to say that we've had citizen deliberation on things like whether we should lower the age of the President to under 35, where nobody really cared what age the President was, and there was very low voter turnout in that. And so it's not as though the Citizens' Assembly, to go back to what I was saying earlier, is going to ignite some public passion on a topic that the public wasn't necessarily interested in in the first place. I would suspect, I don't really have an empirical basis for saying, but citizens being encouraged to get more involved through forums like Citizens' Assemblies can only be a good thing for democratic participation.

[01:20:13 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Felipe or Yves, do you have anything to add on this area?

Yves Dejaeghere: Yes, I mean, I've lectured public policy at some point at the university. I think anybody working public policy, except if you have autocrats, again, on the side of you who just do a crazy thing and everybody follows, regular policy is sometimes very hard to pin down and to track where it originated. There is actually a book by an American political scientist called Kingdon, where he tried to find one water bill and talk to members of Congress, where did this originate and how was it – and it's a whole book about this one thing.

[01:20:50 Yves Dejaeghere appears full screen.]

Yves Dejaeghere: Tracking down dozens of recommendations from a Citizen Assembly and trying to figure out, for example, with the French Convention citoyenne pour le climat, figures have gone from – they implemented 70% of this to 20. But 20 were like, yes, but he was going to do that anyway. But then, okay, did this reinforce it or didn't?

Second of all, policy can be very long term. For example, in Ostbelgien, where there's a recurring, the final discussion is a year after the report is done. Why? Because, for example, in Belgium, we're a federal country, every bill proposal needs to go to the Constitutional Court, and that might take a few months just to read it before it comes. And so, when do you see the implementation of this thing? And then also, people have started measuring this by number of recommendations, but sometimes you can have 20 recommendations, and one is a high-quality recommendation.

To give the example of the one in Mostar I've been involved in, this was about the city was dirty, public utility companies weren't doing their job, but they had three public utility companies. Everybody told me ahead, these have been split along a bit of ethnic lines, so everybody gets their company, their job. In the end, one of the proposals of the citizens was, this is crazy. We need one public utility. It's a waste of money. And this happened. Others were about, we need more bins in the city. If you have the two recommendations, the one happening, in both cases, you could say this is one recommendation that would implement it. But I would say, fusion of public utility companies is really...

So, even the measuring of what this is, is really – and I'm stating you a very obvious one – I'm saying, for example, Belgian Parliament has actually produced a document with 40 recommendations over all those five that they could trace down that had some following. But even several of those, they said, we did part of this, but could not do this. So, I think, again, what I said, if at some point, you do this repetitively, and Seána said, trust of citizens comes in these institutions, and I often refer to the Swiss and the referenda, it comes with that system.

[01:23:12 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Yves Dejaeghere: And they don't always win a referendum, but they trust that this is a system that works. So, if you would always have zero recommendations, of course, the Irish at some point would go, this is a mockery. But it needs to be clear that this was taken seriously,

Fraser Valentine: And voices heard.

Yves Dejaeghere: and that you really need to take [inaudible]. Yes, and I think what Seána said was really important. The minister couldn't explain why they reworded the referendum. There was no good accountability on, why did you change this? Why did you not do this?

Fraser Valentine: So, the accountability is almost embedded in the process in a way, right?

So, we're almost out of time, and I want to end with just one last question for all of you, 30 seconds. What's your one takeaway about democracy in action that you'd like to leave public servants, federal public servants with? If there's one thing about this space, what do you think is important for public servants to hold on to?

Seána, we'll start with you, and we'll go around.

[01:24:24 Seána Glennon appears full screen. Text on screen: Seána Glennon, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in Constitutional Law, University of Ottawa]

Seána Glennon: This is one thing that we haven't mentioned, and it's a little bit of an elephant in the room, I think, for those of us who are quite enthusiastic about deliberative processes. And that is, we have this idea of getting a representative sample of citizens.

And I think most of us know that the most representative among us are the people that don't have the time or inclination or interest to participate in a Citizens' Assembly and give up five weekends in a row. There are people that are working shift jobs. There are people that are taking care of a small baby at home. There's a farmer who has cows in the field. And if we really want to gather, if we really want to do this properly, I think that we need to, as public servants, if you're sitting down to make a plan on this, make it inclusive.

We need to make it so that we can support people who would otherwise ordinarily be excluded from the democratic process to empower them to be able to do it. And whether that means offering to cover childcare, whether it means providing transport, covering expenses, even offering a stipend to recognize that citizens are giving up their valuable time to do this civic work, ensure that there are incentives there, because that's where the Irish process struggled to get off the ground at the beginning, citizens weren't paid, and it ended up being mostly older, middle-class people that ended up accepting these invitations, making it harder to get a representative sample.

So, I think there are plenty of lessons internationally that can be learned if we're trying to reignite our interest in this in the Canadian context.

[01:25:48 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Great. Okay, we have a hard stop. So, 30 seconds, Felipe, go.

[00:25:53 Felipe Rey appears full screen. Text on screen: Felipe Rey, Professor of Constitutional Law, Pontificia Universidad Javeriana]

Felipe Rey: Well, I think that for public servants, my takeaway would be, don't be afraid to innovate. Don't be afraid to change something. Don't be afraid to change things that you've been doing in a same way in the last years. I think that public servants all over the world have been very important for the expansion of Citizens' Assemblies. And I'm sure that in Canada, they can be as well.

[01:26:19 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: Thank you. Yves.

[01:26:21 Yves Dejaeghere appears full screen. Text on screen: Yves Dejaeghere, Executive Director, Federation for Innovation in Democracy - Europe]

Yves Dejaeghere: One key takeaway that we've learned from all these is that many citizens say this is one of the most wonderful things they've done in their life because they discover public service. But we also hear this from civil servants. It'll be hard to do. Somebody compared it to a marriage, planning a marriage. But in the end, also for many civil servants, this has proven a very rewarding job working with citizens. So like Felipe said, don't be afraid. It'll be hard and time-intensive but try to dip your feet into this. Thank you for the invitation, Fraser.

[01:26:55 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: My little takeaway is democracy is messy, and that's okay because you want that engagement to take place.

[01:27:09 Fraser Valentine appears full screen. Text on screen: Fraser Valentine, Faculty Member, Canada School of Public Service ]

Fraser Valentine: As public servants, we're often very focused on the near term for obvious reasons. But, Felipe, you said something I think really important about the institution of the public service and its relationship to a stable democracy. I think these examples demonstrate how that contributes to a stable democracy.

[01:27:27 Split screen: Fraser Valentine, Seána Glennon, Felipe Rey, and Yves Dejaeghere appear in video chat panels.]

Fraser Valentine: So, let me, on behalf of the whole team here at the Canada School, thank each of you for your engagement and your candour. It was a really great conversation. I really, really enjoyed it. The time flew by.

If any of you out there are interested in learning more about democracy and the challenges with it, facing abroad, or here at home, keep an eye on the School website. We've got lots of future events that are coming up in this democratic series.

[01:27:53 Fraser Valentine appears full screen.]

Fraser Valentine: And note that the speaker's presentations will be available under the Bright Space platform under Resources. You can access them there. Have a great day, everybody, and have a great evening, Yves. Thank you very much. Bye.

Seána Glennon: Thank you so much.

[01:28:06 The CSPS animated logo appears onscreen.]

[01:28:12 The Government of Canada wordmark appears.]