Education & Deliberation

Introduction

This section provides information on various tools and techniques that are designed to promote civic education and to enable civic engagement of citizens in a process of deliberation on crucial issues of public governance.

Civic education, also known as citizen education or democracy education is aimed to equip and empower citizens to participate in democratic processes and support democratic and participatory governance. Through civic education, not only a demand for good governance can be created but also a citizenry that is informed and engaged in a deliberative process in the public sphere. Civic education acts as the precursor for deliberative forms of participation by preparing the citizens young and old alike with the appropriate civic values, skills, attitudes and dispositions thus enhancing their capacity o be ‘empowered and deliberative citizens.

A crucial difference between deliberative forms of public participation and the conventional forms of “consultation” such as surveys, public hearings and public comment periods used by the government is that deliberation emphasises information processing, i.e. “meaning-making” over mere information exchange. The deliberation tools not only provide citizens with objective information and enable them to understand the benefits and trade-offs between various policy choices but also facilitate structured dialogue to help clarify their values and priorities, assess a range of policy alternatives and express an informed preference. Deliberative tools envisage varying degrees and levels of citizen involvement some of which border on information exchange and consultation approaches while others are more “empowering” methods in which citizens are vested with necessary rights and authority to make the final decision.

Benefits

Benefits

The benefits of educative and deliberative methods of participatory governance include:

• Knowledgeable, capable, deliberative and active citizens with a huge long term potential for increased levels of civic engagement and political participation;
• Creation of opportunities for citizens to shape and, in some cases, determine public policy;
• Increased public ownership of the policy development process resulting in shared policy preferences across groups/different sections of society thus minimizing friction between interests and maximizing acceptance of the policy and its effective implementation; and
• Well informed, robust and equitable public policies and programs
• Enhanced public trust in the government and synergy between the state and civil society ;

Lessons

Lessons

Educative and deliberative methods allow groups of citizens to come together to learn, discuss, and develop a shared understanding on an issue through consideration of relevant facts from various viewpoints. They favour experience based knowledge over “expert knowledge” to help shape public policies and programs. They seek to foster deeper levels of knowledge among citizens about a particular policy or program issue, and frequently emphasise quality and depth of that knowledge over the breadth and frequency of deliberation. At the same time however, like most participatory governance approaches, deliberative methods are most effective when institutionalised and implemented in a frequent and continuous basis.

Educative and deliberative methods are also known to face the problem of ’elite capture’ allowing more dominant groups in society to monopolise the deliberative spaces thus discouraging participation of the marginalized and the weaker sections of society who infact are the main focus of such approaches. Therefore, educative and delibeative methods need to be designed considering the socio-economic and cultural barriers existent in various societies.

Democratic deliberation can be implemented in a range of contexts, both online and face-to-face, within and outside of government. Deliberation tools and techniques can be used throughout the public governance cycle from agenda setting, policy making and to programme evaluation.

Key Resources

Key Resources

Organisations

Organisations