“Introduction: Advancing Public Deliberation on Climate Change and Other Wicked Problems” in “Public Deliberation on Climate Change”
Introduction
Advancing Public Deliberation on Climate Change and Other Wicked Problems
Lorelei L. Hanson and David Kahane
There is growing recognition that our current modes of public problem solving fail us in many respects, and that new methods of public exchange and decision making are required. Widespread political engagement, adaptive responses, inclusive and innovative collaborative strategies, and collective behaviour changes are needed to address the daunting challenges of our age. Traditional public decision-making processes typically do not accommodate a broad diversity of perspectives and values, or foster sufficient interaction and mutual understanding of perspectives to enable ordinary citizens to engage with the trade-offs and tensions between values. Decision-making processes more often rely on experts to determine the best solutions, or incentivize the expression of polarized positions by a select few. Public deliberation offers an alternative way of addressing our toughest public problems.
This collection examines the multiple tensions and trade-offs that emerge in deliberative citizen engagement processes addressing wicked issues like climate change. Multi-faceted and complex, wicked problems call for ongoing adaptive changes that are tailored to specific contexts and connected to multiple organizational structures and geographies. Wise responses to wicked problems such as climate change require a focus on whole systems, yet the deliberation of dozens of citizens over a few days directed at public policy and procedure recommendations makes it necessary to focus the choices and policy questions and connect them with particular local realities. This volume explores the art of balancing such tensions in deliberative engagements: looking at big picture questions and the brass tacks of particular choices, framing wicked social issues, working with diverse stakeholders and project collaborators, linking citizen processes to expert knowledge, and connecting with other social change processes and actors. It explores these balancing acts in the context of generating effective and urgent responses to a wicked issue that remains controversial and fundamentally challenging.
The four deliberation case studies that form the backdrop of the book were associated with a five-year community–university research project called Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) that drew together a network of scholars, facilitation practitioners, citizens, members of civil society organizations, government officials, and not-for-profits from Canada and other parts of the English-speaking world. Members of ABCD participated in four deliberations connected in varying degrees to climate change, engaging citizens from across the Canadian province of Alberta. Throughout the deliberations, ABCD undertook research (surveys, citizen journalling, interviews, and observations) to assess the impacts of the deliberations on policy outcomes and citizen views. Many of the contributors to this volume were centrally involved with ABCD as process facilitators and/or researchers, and came to the project with a range of experiences, backgrounds, and concerns. Drawing on the work of ABCD, this book explores how to organize, convene, and evaluate public deliberation events in light of theoretically derived “big picture” questions. Core themes include:
- How to design public deliberations to engage effectively with the complexity of wicked problems
- Collaboration involved in developing a core team, building partnerships to carry out deliberations, and working with individuals and groups outside of the core team
- Forms of learning in deliberations, and about deliberations
- Using sources of knowledge that cut across expert and lay, scientific and technical claims, and interests and values
- Understanding the impacts of deliberations on public policy, participants, and broader systems
Although we struggled at times in our deliberative work on climate change in ABCD, we persevered, made mistakes, and had successes. Throughout this book we examine issues and moments that both tripped us up and resulted in innovation. ABCD was born out of a conviction that we need to build capacity within our institutions and society to find new ways to discuss and solve the complex problems of our time, and we willingly share here our experience and knowledge with you to advance public conversations and processes.
Alberta Climate Dialogue: Its History and Legacy
ABCD had its origins at a Washington, DC, meeting of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC) Researchers and Practitioners Group in 2007, a gathering of thought and practice leaders focused on collaboration to advance the field. At that meeting, about a dozen participants identified climate change as the issue that kept them up at night. Given their convictions and experiences around the usefulness of innovative citizen involvement in addressing wicked problems, they decided to work toward convening groups of citizens on climate issues to support learning and political change. This dual commitment to deliberative democracy and to supporting effective climate responses remained foundational to the project.
David Kahane, who would become ABCD’s Project Director and the Principal Investigator of its research grant, suggested that the on-the-ground learning take place in Alberta. Alberta was an interesting and complicated setting in which to undertake public engagement on climate change. For decades, oil and gas have been the motor of the provincial economy; the Progressive Conservatives (a right-of-centre political party in power from 1971 until the end of ABCD’s deliberations) were strongly supportive of this industry, including the Athabasca oil sands (also known as the tar sands). Successive Progressive Conservative governments had pushed back at federal environmental regulations and international conventions they viewed as threats to the oil industry, and public consultation on climate policy had been designed very cautiously and strategically (see Adkin et al. 2016).
The DDC provided seed funding for a three-day workshop that brought together cross-sectoral leaders from Alberta, including elected officials and civil servants from municipal and provincial governments, and deliberative democracy experts from around the world. While the event built enthusiasm for participatory approaches to climate responses in the province, there were struggles to sustain momentum in the year that followed, given the many different ideas about how citizens might become involved. A core group of deliberative democracy researchers and practitioners met in 2009 to develop a grant application to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; they proposed to work with governments to convene citizen deliberations focused on policy, and they prioritized municipal collaborations in view of pessimism about the provincial government’s willingness to partner. The application was successful, providing C$1 million for community–university research during 2010–15, with the requirement that research accompany each citizen deliberation.
As ABCD took shape as a formal project with twenty-three community partners and thirty-five researchers, there were ongoing challenges in aligning understandings of climate change and deliberative democracy. The core team that would undertake much of the work included six seasoned researchers and practitioners of deliberative democracy, and an equal number of other ABCD members, most of them academics who did not come from the deliberative democracy world. ABCD team members struggled with how this approach could contribute to political or systemic change around climate issues. Further, while ethical and political concerns about climate change were widely shared in the project, few team members were experienced researchers or activists around the issue. The project team was further divided by institutional affiliations and expectations, and by geographic location: it included academics, most located in Alberta’s capital of Edmonton but some contributing from a distance; deliberation practitioners and consultants coming mostly from outside of Alberta; and non-government Alberta organization partners, whose own organizations’ approaches were not completely aligned with the vernacular of “deliberation” and associated approaches to political change. Over the years other participants were involved in specific ABCD projects and workshops, coming from energy companies, Indigenous communities and organizations, community groups, and the provincial government; many of these participants did not sustain their involvement in the project. Building common understandings was thus a constant challenge, made more difficult because many members of the team were involved in ABCD off the corners of their desks and had diverse reasons for being involved.
ABCD was challenged in its first two years to develop deliberation partnerships with government: these were vital to our aspiration to support effective climate responses, and also to the case-based research we had been funded to carry out. ABCD had strong capacity to offer around innovative citizen involvement, but we were “selling” approaches to governments and other organizations in Alberta that were not actively seeking them. Moreover, ABCD’s goal of convening citizen deliberations to support better climate responses meant that we were seeking to collaborate on participatory processes that grappled directly with climate questions, whereas some partners often were interested in help on a range of engagement projects not framed in terms of climate. While some in ABCD searched for and developed partnerships, two ABCD members observed and undertook research activities on a public deliberation convened by the Centre for Public Involvement (CPI), a small not-for-profit jointly funded by the University of Alberta and the City of Edmonton. Although that deliberation focused on the development of an urban food and agriculture strategy and was only peripherally related to climate change, it provided an opportunity for ABCD members to witness deliberation in action. After many months, a partnership was forged with the City of Edmonton in 2012 that would result in the Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges. In the third year of the project, ABCD explored the possibility of a civil society-based deliberative process, but this was not judged to be promising given our capacity. Instead a call was sent to members of ABCD to propose deliberation projects, which produced two further deliberative partnerships, with the Oldman Watershed Council and the Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance.
When it came to the models actually used in these deliberations, two factors loomed large: the goals and priorities of partners who were going to use the outcomes of deliberation in their decision making; and which practitioners in ABCD were willing not only to advocate for particular approaches but to contribute substantial time to project development. Because of the needs of partners, as well as the orientation of ABCD members and the practitioners available to help design and facilitate deliberations, ABCD’s deliberations all were mini-publics, which involve diverse individuals invited to participate in carefully structured, facilitated deliberation that produces learning or recommendations for an organization that has helped to convene the event.
Over the years, many of us in ABCD gained an appreciation of each other’s perspectives and approaches, but as we look back on our work we also realize that there remain a number of key differences of opinion on how best to approach public deliberation and to respond effectively to climate change. This persistent diversity of perspectives reflects the diversity of ABCD’s members and their levels of involvement, the messy realities of public deliberation, and the complexity and tensions of collaboration on wicked problems.
A Super Wicked Problem
December 2015 marked what many consider a historic event: the world’s first global climate agreement was reached as a part of the twenty-first Conference of the Parties to the United Nation’s (UN’s) Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP 21). The Paris Agreement, negotiated by the European Union and 195 nation states, expressed commitment to holding global warming to an increase of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, and to achieve a carbon-neutral world by 2050. The agreement also obligated industrialized nations by 2020 to collectively provide $100 billion annually to assist developing countries in adapting to the impacts of climate change and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (UN 2015).
This historic climate change deal was met with simultaneous fanfare and criticism. Guardian columnist George Monbiot (2015) captured this paradox of reaction in his characterization of the Paris Agreement as both miracle and disaster. In his words:
Inside the narrow frame within which the talks have taken place, the draft agreement at the UN climate talks in Paris is a great success . . . its aspirational limit of 1.5C of global warming, after the rejection of this demand for so many years, can be seen within this frame as a resounding victory . . . . Outside the frame it looks like something else. . . . Though negotiated by some nations in good faith, the real outcomes are likely to commit us to levels of climate breakdown that will be dangerous to all and lethal to some.
The pre-conference pledges provided by 186 countries would result in a global temperature rise of 2.7°C or higher (République Française 2015), but the agreement included a framework for the pledges to be expanded and strengthened. The 1.5°C goal was a key demand of developing countries already experiencing the harsh effects of climate change and rising sea levels, but the lack of a clear strategy to maintain temperatures at that level, the voluntary nature of the emission targets, lack of a strict timeline, and the non-binding nature of the commitments rendered the deal meaningless in the view of many (Harvey 2015; Lukacs 2015). While aspirational, the Paris Agreement is short on details about how comprehensive emission reductions and compensation to less developed nations can be practically achieved and politically enforced.
In spite of nearly universal consensus in the scientific community that there is a causal connection between climate change and human activity (IPCC 2015), governance institutions have repeatedly failed in creating policies to effectively address climate change. These failures are in part a result of the “wicked” nature of this problem. Traditional responses to policy issues work from problems to solutions: the problem is defined, outcomes and outputs determined, implementation plans designed, and performance targets specified. Yet because of their non-linear and unpredictable trajectories, wicked problems defy such approaches to problem solving. Over forty years ago, Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber (1973) detailed the features of wicked issues that challenge “rational” policy approaches like cost-benefit analysis; these social problems defy straightforward planning responses because:
- Wicked problems are difficult to clearly define—there is more than one explanation of the problem, and proposed solutions depend on how the problem is defined.
- Wicked problems involve multiple interdependencies and are often multi-causal—stakeholders have different views, interests, and goals.
- Wicked problems result in unforeseen consequences—they exist in complex systems that exhibit unpredictable, emergent behaviours.
- Wicked problems are not stable—understanding of the problem constantly evolves.
- Wicked problems have no clear solutions—solutions can only be good or bad, not true or false.
- Wicked problems are socially complex, and this, more than their technical features, makes them overwhelming.
- Wicked problems seldom are the responsibility of only one jurisdiction, organization or authority—typically these problems cross many boundaries.
- Wicked problems require changing behaviours—innovative methods beyond legislation, fines, and taxes are required to motivate organizations and individuals to actively co-operate on transformation.
- Wicked problems are characterized by chronic policy failures—they are intractable despite numerous attempts to solve them. (APSC 2007; Riedy 2013)
Many social issues are difficult to solve, but a problem is wicked if it is “indeterminate in time and scale” and therefore “can’t be fixed” (Kolko 2012); and if high stakes, incomplete and contradictory information, diverse perspectives, multiple engaged interests, and continually changing contexts undermine traditional means of decision making (Hernández 2014; Kolko 2012; Lorenzoni and Pidgeon 2006). Mitigating the negative consequences of wicked problems and finding more desirable trajectories of social development require holistic rather than partial and linear thinking, innovative and flexible approaches, long-term and coordinated responses across government boundaries and between different sectors of society, and toleration of uncertainty (Collins and Ison 2009a and 2009b; Hale 2010); most existing policy and planning mechanisms and systems are incapable of effectively operating in this way.
In the case of climate change, the interdependency, circularity, and uncertainty associated with wicked problems are further confounded by a set of additionally troublesome features that make this a “super wicked” problem:
- Time is running out.
- Those causing the problem are also those proposing the solutions.
- The central authority tasked with solving the problem is weak or non-existent.
- The proposed policy responses irrationally discount the future, in part because the causes of climate change are invisible, and the impacts distant, in terms of both time and geography (Moser 2010; Levin et al. 2012).
Super wicked problems create a tragic dilemma: “even when we collectively recognize the need to act now to avoid the catastrophic impacts, the immediate implications of required behavioral changes overwhelm our collective interest in policy change and the ability of the political and policy systems at multiple levels to respond” (Levin et al. 2012, 148). Such has been the tragic response to climate change: too many times, climate agreements have become merely aspirational statements that are largely ignored after they are signed because those most responsible for and able to address this global predicament must get back to business as usual.
The repeated failures of international climate negotiations to arrive at an agreement adequate to the scale and complexity of the problem feed the conviction that more effective action on climate change is impossible. Yet there are myriad examples demonstrating humanity’s remarkable ability to unmake social norms to prevent further tragedy. Glimmers of hope for humanity’s ability to correct its course of action can be seen, for instance, in jurisdictions enshrining the rights of nature into law—this has happened in Ecuador, followed by Bolivia and Pittsburgh (Klein 2014)—precipitous declines in violence among humans over the last century, including decreased rates of genocide, war, homicide, sexual and domestic violence, violence against homosexuals, and capital punishment (Pinker 2015); and regeneration of biodiversity and depleted soils through perennial, polyculture food production demonstrated by individuals and organizations in different parts of the world, including the Land Institute in Kansas (Land Institute 2017) and the Zatuna Farm in Australia (Lawton 2017). More specifically, the work of social movements challenging social and economic reliance on fossil fuels through court proceedings, protests, civil disobedience, and divestment campaigns (Klein 2014; Lukacs 2015) provides hopeful signs of a convergence of diverse constituencies around compelling action on climate change.
ABCD was driven by the conviction that bold and immediate climate action is both required and possible, and that citizens can play direct and indirect roles in bringing about such change. As many of the chapters will demonstrate, we struggled among ourselves and with our partners, and worked with citizens to address the layered complexity and “super wickedness” of climate change in a political context where the very existence of climate change was still being debated.
But What Kind of Wicked Problem Is It?
In the days leading up to the Paris Agreement, billboards were put up in Alberta’s two metropolitan centres, Edmonton and Calgary, stating: “Global Warming? Not for 18+ years!” and “The sun is the main driver of climate change. Not you. Not CO2.” The environmental law charity Ecojustice filed a complaint with the federal Competition Bureau asking it to investigate the false and misleading claims made by the Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute (Kent 2015, Mandel 2015), which had sponsored the billboards. According to Thomas Duck, a Canadian atmospheric scientist who also signed the complaint, “These groups attempt to discredit the established scientific consensus that global warming and climate change are real and caused by human activity. The reality, causes and consequences of climate change are well understood” (Mandel 2015).
Despite Duck’s insistence that the dispute over climate change is settled, the billboards as well as the COP 21 negotiations are evidence that many aspects of this debate remain unresolved. The billboard incident highlights a contextual factor central to the case studies featured in this book: in spite of recent elections of provincial and federal governments committed to addressing climate change, climate denial, though a minority voice, still flourishes in Alberta. Yet even if everyone were to agree that the climate is changing and that these changes are largely caused by human activities, this would not resolve all questions about the biophysical uncertainties of this physical phenomenon, or the epistemological and value questions associated with it. Variable meanings circulate about what exactly climate change is and what should be done to address it (Hulme 2009a). Like all wicked issues, climate change is characterized by fierce contestation about how to define the problem and its solution.
To date, climate change has largely been framed as an urgent scientific issue. Formation of global research networks like the International Geosphere–Biosphere Program in 1986 and the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988 have enabled collection of large amounts of data and research from numerous scientific disciplines, expanding our knowledge about the sources, nature, and implications of climate change (Brulle and Dunlap 2015). For example, the IPCC’s assessment reports (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007, and 2014) have outlined increases in anthropogenic GHG emissions and global temperatures, and the resulting environmental risks posed by these changes, including melting glaciers, warming oceans, increased precipitation, changes in extreme weather and climate events, and future projections of these changes and impacts. As well, more recent IPCC reports address both climate change mitigation (limiting GHG emissions) and, to a lesser extent, adaptation (enhancing our ability to respond to existing and emerging impacts from climate change); detail the likely socio-economic consequences of climate change with respect to food security, human health, species extinction, water availability, and displacement of people; and outline effective responses to climate mitigation and adaptation (IPCC 2014).
Each finding is accompanied by an indication of the degree of confidence in the assertion, ranging from very low to very high: for example, there is high confidence that anthropogenic activities have increased atmospheric levels of GHGs like CO2, and low confidence that mitigation policies could raise the price for some energy services and hamper the ability to expand modern services to those most in need (IPCC 2014). In spite of the uncertainties, through the IPCC and other scientific forums, the “organized power of science” has initiated and shaped a public policy debate about the most urgent and important issue facing the planet (Szersynski and Urry 2010, 2). The message they provide is clear: “Climate change has the characteristics of a collective action problem at the global scale” with “very high risk of severe, widespread impacts globally” (IPCC 2014, 17).
In presenting not only data about global climate trends, conditions, and projections but also prescriptions for effective mitigation and adaptation strategies, climate scientists have stepped beyond the role of detached, objective observers into making value-laden judgments about not only what is dangerous but what they consider an appropriate response to this danger. In other words, “Science is being used to justify claims not merely about how the world is (what are called ‘positive’ statements), but about what is or is not desirable—about how the world should be (‘normative’ statements)” (Hulme 2009a, 74, emphasis in original). Given how carefully vetted the IPCC membership is, these reports could be taken to communicate the further message that only experts and elites are able to offer an accurate estimation of the climate change problem, its impacts, and legitimate responses to it (Beck 2010).
The intersection of science and politics is nothing new. For example, former US Vice President and Nobel Laureate Al Gore, in expressing support for the US Global Climate Change Research Program, declared that “more research and better research and better targeted research is [sic] absolutely essential if we are going to eliminate the remaining areas of uncertainty and build the broader and stronger political consensus necessary for the unprecedented actions required to address this problem” (SCCST 1989, in Pielke 2007, 87). Climate scientist Mike Hulme, who worked at the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit in 2009 when the institute’s professional emails were stolen and used to seed public doubt about the existence of climate change, publicly reflected on the “Climategate” controversy by highlighting how climate science was being used as a proxy for political battles. In his words, the mantra “Get the science right, reduce the scientific uncertainties, compel everyone to believe it . . . and we will have won . . . is [not] only an unrealistic view about how policy gets made, it also places much too great a burden on science, certainly climate science” (Hulme 2009b). Many of the issues associated with mitigation of and adaptation to climate change are highly technical and complex. Scientific information is clearly needed, but science has its limits as well. In decision contexts where there are shared commitments to a specific goal and little uncertainty, it is quite possible for a clear policy outcome to arise directly from scientific data, but in complex, highly ambiguous contexts that involve value conflicts and great uncertainty, such as those that characterize wicked problems, scientific data alone cannot determine the appropriate course of action. As Pielke (2007) explains:
Science can help us to understand the associations between different choices and their outcomes. . . . Yet, science is rarely a sufficient basis for selecting among alternative courses of action because desired outcomes invariably involve differing conceptions of the sort of world we want in the future. Whether or not avoiding a particular amount of climate change is desirable, or whether or not the risks of nuclear power or GMOs exceed the benefits, are not issues that can be resolved by science alone, but must instead be handled through political processes characterized by bargaining, negotiation and compromise through the exercise of power (139–40).
Coming to agreement about the kind of world we would like in the context of a changing climate requires evaluation of the costs and benefits of different possible responses in the context of different conceptions of values, and consideration of how these responses will impact various regions, people, and ecosystems. Climate vulnerability and adaptation are highly context-specific, requiring consideration of local bio-geography and existing community assets and liabilities, including social networks, demographic composition, socio-economic characteristics, local knowledge and values, and non-climatic pressures (Lorenzoni, Nicholson-Cole, and Whitmarsh 2007; Preston et al. 2011; Wolf 2011). Civic participation and deliberation are key to capturing such knowledge.
Public Participation and Governance
The essential role of public participation in climate governance has long been recognized. Public participation refers to “organized processes adopted by elected officials, government agencies, or other public- or private-sector organizations to engage the public in environmental assessment, planning, decision making, management, monitoring, and evaluation” (National Research Council 2008, 1). The Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, at which the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was initially negotiated, clearly identified the key role for public participation in addressing climate change: Article 6 outlines the need for “public access to information on climate change and its effects” and “public participation in addressing climate change and its effects and developing adequate responses” (UN 1992). Over the past few decades the importance of public participation has been reaffirmed in all major UN sustainable development resolutions, and in 2010 the Governing Council of the UN Environment Programme adopted “a voluntary set of guidelines for national legislation on access to information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters” (Jodoin, Duyck, and Lofts 2015, 118). Likewise, public participation has become an essential component of environmental governance processes in many national, regional, and municipal jurisdictions (e.g., City of Edmonton 2005, UN 1992, and National Research Council 2008).
While many recognize the importance of incorporating public participation in environmental management decisions, it is not always clear what this entails. Public participation scholarship highlights two categories of benefits—process and outcome—and two beneficiaries—citizens and government (Irvin and Stansbury 2004). Theoretical justifications for public participation include normative and pragmatic claims about its value: it reflects people’s democratic right to participate in decisions that affect their lives, and increases trust in public policy decisions and civil society, thereby creating greater public buy-in, and results in higher-quality decisions because it incorporates a diversity of values and needs (Few, Brown, and Tompkins 2007; Jodoin, Duyck, and Lofts 2015; Reed 2008). As well, some scholars emphasize the importance of increasing the capacity of citizens to effectively engage in participatory decision-making processes (Dietz 2013). In spite of the breadth of these assumed benefits, few attempts have been made to systematically test the validity of these claims (Reed 2008; Dietz 2013).
Alongside calls for increased public engagement in environmental governance has come recognition of the challenges associated with undertaking effective public participation. The difficulties range from debate over different modes of engagement and the extent to which different engagement forums allow for active and meaningful inclusion of the public, to practical and conceptual challenges in securing broadly based citizen representation and ferment over how to appropriately frame issues (Aklin and Urpelainen 2013; Dietz 2013; Few, Brown, and Tompkins 2008; Hulme 2009a; Jasanoff 2010). In the context of climate change, the challenge is to engage citizens and stakeholders effectively in decision-making processes that address complex, ambiguous, multi-scale wicked issues affecting multiple stakeholders and institutions, while focusing the discussion on both “reactive adaptation (responding to an event) and anticipatory adaptation (responding to an expected or likely event)” (Collins and Ison 2009a, 359). Such situational framing needs to move beyond the emphasis on climate change as a global phenomenon, which can suggest an abstract world emptied of social and cultural context where the differences of geography, class, occupation, and gender are largely erased (Jasanoff 2010). While a global view may be an appropriate abstraction for climate modelling, such an apolitical and aspatial framing fails to acknowledge both the variability of risks and resources in different locations and the abilities of different peoples and species to effectively respond to the impacts of climate change (Jasanoff 2010; Klein 2014; Methmann, Rothe, and Stephan 2013). Most people understand the impacts of climate change “in a situated and relational way” (Chilvers et al. 2014, 174) and connect this phenomenon to other concerns in their everyday lives (Leiserowitz 2006; Lorenzoni and Pidgeon 2006). Consequently, a key challenge in engaging citizens in decisions related to climate adaptation is to move them beyond simply perceiving problems and advocating instead for solutions based on spatial and temporal immediacy (Few, Brown, and Tompkins 2007).
Those tasked with designing public participation forums that acknowledge and build upon such diversity often speak of designing dynamic co-evolutionary social learning processes (Collins and Ison 2009a and 2009b; Dietz 2013; Hale 2010; Reed 2008). As used in climate adaptation research and practice, social learning refers to a collective and communicative learning process that moves away from an individualized, educational emphasis. Social learning highlights the need for iterative learning processes involving multiple kinds of knowledge (scientific, community, political); questioning norms, objectives, and policies; and discussing facts, interests, and values. These forms of reflection enable participants to formulate integrated climate adaptation and mitigation strategies (Bos, Brown, and Farrelly 2013; Collins and Ison 2009b; Robinson and Berkes 2011; van der Wal et al. 2014). Successful social learning should result in stakeholders “developing new collective capacities to deal with common problems. . .to implement conscious and long term adaptive changes in cognitive frameworks of action, and in institutional arrangements, so as to achieve common goals that would otherwise not be achieved individually” (Tàbara et al. 2010, 2).
Public Deliberation as a Form of Public Participation
Public participation is a very broad term: it includes grassroots democracy, civil society mobilization, and forums organized by governments and other organizations to elicit the views of citizens. One can narrow things somewhat by talking about public involvement and public engagement: here, the emphasis is on forums for citizens convened by governments, businesses, and other organizations, including focus groups, town hall meetings, public consultations, design charrettes, and many other mechanisms; groups like the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2) bring together expertise and resources relevant to this wide range of engagement approaches. Deliberative democracy or public deliberation narrows things still further: deliberative approaches centre on diverse participants reasoning together, hearing a diversity of perspectives, articulating underlying values, weighing trade-offs, and coming to a common decision, supported by good information and a clear sense of the influence their voices will have. Most public consultation processes—at least in Alberta—are only weakly deliberative: they typically do not support sustained reasoning between participants, provide only limited information about the issue and the political context for decisions, and elicit existing beliefs and commitments rather than exposing these to challenges and sustained dialogical exploration.
Public deliberation has existed in different forms in many historical and contemporary contexts, from the Athenian city-state to the town hall meetings of early New England: anywhere that ordinary citizens could meet together to exchange perspectives and reasons about political choices in ways that shaped the actions of government. In contemporary mass politics, though, there is a wide gulf between citizens and governments, and fewer and fewer spaces in which citizen deliberation can influence government decisions. And yet intellectuals, scholars, and activists have kept alive the vision of meaningful, thoughtful citizen involvement as a part of political decision making. John Dewey (1927), writing in the United States, emphasized the importance to democracy of inclusive deliberation by citizens as a counterweight to expert and elite influence on government. And since the 1980s, deliberative democracy has become a core theme in political and social theory.
Deliberative democracy as a social and political theory owes much to Jürgen Habermas, a German social theorist and public intellectual. Habermas criticizes the extent to which political life in modern democracies has been given over to elite decision making, and also to the logics of bureaucracies and markets (Habermas 1987). He offers a philosophically careful articulation of the qualities of collective, communicative reasoning needed to reach legitimate democratic decisions (Habermas 1985), and in later work explores how this reasoning can be achieved through an interplay of informal deliberation in the public sphere and formal decision making by elected bodies (Habermas 1996).
Habermas’s interest is in theoretically articulating the nature of good deliberation, and in looking at how deliberation can fit within the major structures of a contemporary liberal democracy. It has fallen to other theorists and social scientists to consider the finer-grained institutions and practices through which public deliberation can take place. Key scholars of more pragmatic dimensions of deliberative democracy include James Bohman (1996), Andrea Cornwall (2008), John Dryzek (2010), Archon Fung (2003), Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson (1998), and Iris Young (2001). In a series of debates and interventions, these and many other theorists explore normative questions around democratic deliberation: who needs to be included and what inclusion means; how structural dynamics of marginalization and oppression can diminish or prevent the participation and influence of particular social groups and how this can be mitigated; different forms of expression and reasoning and how these fit into deliberative processes; what kinds of decision procedures can express the will of participants; and how deliberative democratic participation can and should shape the participants themselves as well as broader political processes.
From the late 1990s, scholarship on deliberative democracy has taken a more practical turn, studying particular examples of public deliberation such as citizen juries, citizen assemblies, deliberative polls, and consensus conferences (in the language introduced earlier, these are “mini-publics”). This practical turn draws on theoretical articulations of what public deliberation should be like, and uses the tools of social science to explore the actual structure and dynamics of particular exercises, emphasizing their deliberative quality, impacts on participants, and influence on political decisions (e.g., Gastil and Levine 2005; Johnson 2015; Lee 2015; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015; Rowe and Frewer 2004). This practical turn in scholarship coincides with a growth in professional networks of dialogue and deliberation practitioners, which also involve academics: for example, the International Association for Public Participation, the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, and the Canadian Community for Dialogue and Deliberation. A further intersection of research and practice can be found at www.participedia.org, which assembles thousands of examples of participatory initiatives, including data about their design and impacts.
The terminology around deliberative and non-deliberative approaches to public participation is tangled and inconsistent. This section has drawn a distinction between deliberative approaches to public involvement and a broader range of tools that engage citizens but without the emphasis on careful collective reasoning across differences to shape political decisions. This is a spectrum rather than a dichotomy. The most common terms used to describe the deliberative end of the spectrum are deliberative democracy, citizen deliberation, public deliberation, and deliberative dialogue; practical exercises that have strongly deliberative qualities travel under names like consensus conferences, citizen juries, citizen panels, and citizen assemblies. A whole host of terms is used to describe forms of public participation that place less emphasis on deliberation as we’ve defined it here: public consultation, public engagement, public involvement, and public dialogue. These terms are used differently by different experts and lay people, and this slipperiness of terminology is a challenge when it comes to communicating about public deliberation.
Concerns about Public Deliberation
Theoretical and social scientific literatures on public deliberation tend to characterize it quite positively. On the theoretical side, public deliberation is taken to be a crucial source of democratic legitimacy and public trust, as well as an important way to build civic skills and capacity (Bohman 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1998; Habermas 1996). Social scientific research often draws on this normative view and substantiates the ability of citizens to wrestle with technically complex issues, learn across diversities of perspective, and come to agreement on paths forward. There also is strong evidence that participants enjoy deliberative processes (Abelson and Gauvin 2006; Rosenberg 2007, though for a cautionary perspective on the quality of this social scientific work see Pincock 2012).
Yet there is a range of critical worries about deliberative democracy, expressed by some of its scholarly advocates (e.g., Bickford 1996; Bohman 1996; Williams 1998; Young 2001) and also by scholars who are skeptical of its benefits or more deeply concerned about its deficits. These critical worries relate to power, inclusion, and marginalization, and to dynamics of power and privilege both between participants and with facilitators and experts (Coelho and von Lieres 2010; Cornwall and Gaventa 2001; Cornwall and Coelho 2007; Fischer 2009; Forester 2009; Gaventa and Barrett 2010; Hendriks 2011). One of the most enduring concerns with deliberative democracy is that notwithstanding the normative aspirations of theorists and the good intentions of practitioners, public deliberation can end up reinforcing rather than challenging power relations among participants; between privileged and marginalized social groups; and between participating citizens, experts, and elites (Bickford 1996; Williams 1998; Young 2001).
Another emerging literature looks at the professionalization of public participation, which is increasingly carried out by credentialed experts and large consultancies, and shaped by norms, networks, and trainings that characterize an increasingly networked field. A particularly astringent critique is offered by Carolyn Lee (2015): she suggests that while professional facilitators and process designers speak consistently of the empowering effects of participation and the need to tailor it to particular contexts, in fact there is an overall sameness to the repertoire of techniques used. Moreover, she argues that participation exercises often provide the illusion of democratic influence, while in fact fitting smoothly with neoliberal state power and managerialism. Genevieve Johnson (2015) also offers a pessimistic view of the influence of public deliberation: looking at four Canadian case studies of well-resourced and organized deliberations, she suggests that they had very limited impact on elite decision making.
A Systems Approach to Public Deliberation
A further scholarly current around public deliberation is deliberative systems theory. Deliberative systems theorists criticize the focus on particular mini-publics, and urge attention instead to how deliberative norms can be met at the level of a whole political system. In some ways this is continuous with Habermas’s (1996) interest in how formal and informal institutions of democracy can fit into a functioning democratic whole. Deliberative systems theorists draw more explicitly on scholarship about mini-publics and are more focused on the particular institutional shape of deliberation in a complex democracy. In the words of Mansbridge et al.,
To understand the larger goal of deliberation, we suggest that it is necessary to go beyond the study of individual institutions and processes to examine their interaction in the system as a whole. We recognize that most democracies are complex entities in which a wide variety of institutions, associations, and sites of contestation accomplish political work—including informal networks, the media, organized advocacy groups, schools, foundations, private and non-profit institutions, legislatures, executive agencies, and the courts. We thus advocate what may be called a systemic approach to deliberative democracy. (2012, 1–2)
Deliberative systems theory enables a more differentiated understanding of mechanisms of deliberative democracy and governance. And it offers a more subtle normative evaluation of deliberative settings. Hayley Stevenson and John Dryzek (2014) provide one of the most comprehensive articulations of how to assess the deliberative quality of a political system, suggesting one needs to look at the health of:
- The public space (the range of narratives and views expressed in the media, civil society, and among citizens)
- The empowered space (the range of views interacting in legitimate spaces of collective political decision, e.g. parliaments, courts)
- The formal and informal transmission of views and narratives between public and empowered spaces
- The accountability of empowered spaces to public space (through elections, transparency mechanisms, public hearings, etc.)
- Private spaces (and how well views arising in non-civic spaces are transmitted to public and empowered spaces)
- Meta-deliberation on the deliberative quality of the system as a whole, and how well it is reflecting the diversity of narratives and discourses in society
- The decisiveness of the deliberative system in yet broader systems—that is, whether it yields outcomes that affect people’s lives (Stevenson and Dryzek 2014, 27–29).
This approach requires an assessment of dynamics and influences that go far beyond the boundaries of any particular mini-public. And the reach of these seven elements of democracy provides a backdrop for worrying about the ambivalent impact of mini-publics.
Simon Burall draws out the potentially negative effects of mini-publics on broader democratic and governance systems. Deliberative mini-publics are usually “conceived of, framed and run by those in authority.” As a result, participation “can be used to reinforce authority rather than challenge it, becoming a management tool for securing legitimacy about specific decisions of or institutions themselves” (Burall 2015, 22–23). Moreover, “because much contemporary participation is generated by those in authority, at isolated points throughout the system, the risk is that citizen energy and participation is diffused and prevents the development of the forms of mass participation that were successful in pushing for change in earlier decades” (Burall 2015, 23). Approaching public deliberation as a system, rather than as a series of discrete initiatives, guards against the tendency to expect too much of specific mini-publics. Deficiencies in one part of the system can be made up in other areas (though for a critique of this functional way of assessing deliberativeness, see Owen and Smith 2015).
Alberta Climate Dialogue in the Context of Deliberative Democracy
ABCD was initiated by a group of public deliberation scholars and practitioners who wanted to make a difference to climate responses in Alberta, and also to generate learning that could advance the field of deliberative democracy.
ABCD as a whole thus walked interesting lines when it came to relating its work to the diversity of the field, and especially to critical worries about mini-publics and public deliberation. On the one hand, the project sought to make space for critical inquiry and reflection, especially in three major team workshops; moreover, a number of participants in these workshops were scholars working within these critical literatures (Blue and Medlock 2014; Blue, Medlock, and Einseidel 2013; Gaventa 2006; Kahane et al. 2013; Parkins and Mitchell 2005; Parkins 2006; von Lieres and Kahane 2007), and key practitioners in the project also brought a critical eye to the work. On the other hand, a commitment to supporting climate responses, the exigencies of building and holding deliberations, and passion about public deliberation often shaved the edges off these critical worries, or moved them to the level of design decisions within mini-publics, rather than big questions about the systemic role of mini-publics. The chapters that follow thus provide interesting studies in the relationship of deliberative theory to practice, and of the challenges of sustaining a scholar’s version of critical engagement when enmeshed in complex and demanding community-based and practice-based action research.
Structure of the Book
This volume is intended to inform scholars, students, public participation and deliberation practitioners, and public officials interested in democratic deliberation and environmental governance. It is designed as an academic collection that engages with theory and social policy, and simultaneously as a resource for practitioners and decision makers who seek insights and techniques related to public deliberation on wicked issues like climate change. The book is organized into eight chapters that explore the strengths, limitations, and challenges of using deliberative methods as an approach to public engagement and decision making about wicked policy problems. To highlight the situated perspectives of the contributors, each chapter includes a short description of the author(s) and their key roles in ABCD. As well, each chapter connects theories and practices of both public deliberation and climate change politics, demonstrating to readers key issues that arise in considering and designing deliberative initiatives.
We built a companion website that provides multiple ways of engaging with this book. While some readers interested in the challenges in using deliberative dialogue to engage citizens about wicked issues, and in reflecting on big picture questions and how they influence particular choices, may want to read the entire book, those wanting a more accessible way into the discussion can use the website, which links to each individual chapter and also offers a quick overview of the entire book, chapter “take-aways,” and beginner and advanced resource lists on each topic.
In Chapter 1, Lorelei Hanson provides a profile of the four citizen deliberation projects members of ABCD actively participated in from 2012 to 2014. Hanson highlights the unique features of each public deliberation and the successes and challenges in realizing key social learning outcomes to allow for collective agreement and action. The voices of citizens and the volunteer small group facilitators and note takers are emphasized in this chapter, thus integrating their experiences and views into the critical evaluation of each of the four ABCD deliberations.
Chapter 2 expands on the discussion of public deliberation provided in the introduction. David Kahane and Gwendolyn Blue outline the promise of, and key debates within, deliberative democracy theory and practice, and trace how these were reflected in ABCD’s work. They explore how climate change poses particular challenges to deliberative approaches, including those around framing, representation, and the politics of knowledge.
Chapter 3 describes the political and economic contexts within which ABCD operated. As Geoff Salomons and John Parkins demonstrate, an understanding of history and context is key to successfully designing and facilitating effective and meaningful public deliberation. They describe how upper levels of government were reluctant to undertake citizen deliberation on climate change because it did not align with ideological positions and political goals, and why there was more interest and uptake at the municipal level. The authors also illustrate how municipal governments are most immediately impacted by climate change and require large-scale buy-in from citizens to move forward on complex social policy issues; they therefore can be willing to undertake deliberative citizen involvement even when outcomes are unsure and may threaten powerful interests.
Chapter 4 explores how climate change is framed and presented and how this influences dialogue and action. While deliberation typically focuses on individual ideas, interests, and values, Gwendolyn Blue demonstrates how these are shaped by language and discourse. Blue highlights two prominent global discourses of climate change—mitigation and adaption—and how these climate discourses influence public deliberation, including how the problem is conceptualized and the solutions and actions open for consideration. She argues that organizers of public deliberation on climate change should identify and integrate the range of issue frames and options that interested and affected parties consider viable.
Chapter 5 examines how participants are recruited for deliberative exercises. Shelley Boulianne highlights key theoretical debates and methodological issues associated with recruiting for representativeness and inclusivity. She analyzes recruitment for the four public deliberations ABCD participated in, revealing challenges in ensuring that a truly representative group of citizens is convened, and discussing trade-offs in representativeness when inclusion of minority voices is a key objective. She concludes that a focus on climate change complicates recruitment for public deliberation. Too often, citizens engage in self-selection when wicked and complex scientific issues are at stake, resulting in biases that impact the policy recommendations that arise out of deliberative exercises.
Chapter 6 discusses the essential role of collaboration in public deliberation projects, particularly those focused on social learning to effectively address wicked issues. Collaborators bring divergent knowledge, norms, ways of navigating political bureaucracies, and communication styles, as well as conflicting allegiances and identifications. David Kahane and Lorelei Hanson explore challenges, tensions, strengths, and opportunities that arose in the four ABCD-linked deliberation projects. They suggest that collaboration was most successful when parties were strongly invested in outcomes, when communication was open, and where there was sufficient time to develop mutual trust.
Chapter 7 presents the perspective of experienced deliberation practitioners Mary Pat MacKinnon, Jacquie Dale, and Susanna Haas Lyons, who were centrally involved in designing and facilitating three of ABCD’s deliberations. They explore challenges associated with framing a topic for deliberation, particularly a topic as complex as climate change. They describe techniques for practically addressing the deliberation context, seizing opportunities for impact, and addressing partners’ expectations. The chapter highlights the role of values in public deliberation, how to manage differences in topical knowledge and ways of knowing/learning, and how to work with dynamics of ownership and power within groups of participants. The chapter authors provide a useful overview of both the flexibility and rewards of public deliberation, and challenges in designing and facilitating processes that produce authentic and useful results with impact for both citizens and decision makers.
Chapter 8 looks more broadly at strengths and limitations of deliberative democracy in addressing complex systemic problems. David Kahane outlines eight stories of social change told within the deliberative democracy community in order to critically evaluate ABCD’s impact. He argues that neither the field of deliberative democracy nor ABCD has sufficiently focused on a whole systems approach, and considers why this is the case. Through a review of the key insights from the fields of systems thinking, user-centred design, and systemic design, he demonstrates benefits of methodically and consistently organizing complex deliberations around questions of systems change, in terms of the orientation of the overall project, the development of particular partnerships, and the design of citizen deliberations. In this way, he provides a useful set of considerations for those embarking on public deliberation projects to more effectively address wicked issues like climate change.
The conclusion provides a short overview of the key themes and observations highlighted in each of the preceding chapters. Tom Prugh and Matt Leighninger discuss the role public deliberation could play in an increasingly activist urban and community-centred society that is grappling with profound shifts in climate, the economy, and energy systems. While recognizing public deliberation is not without its limitations and problems, the authors argue that it offers a method for citizens to come to grips with wicked issues like climate change that are both universal and particular. Deliberation combined with local action provides a potent combination for sustained engagement through which citizens can anticipate and cope with the coming environmental challenges wrought by climate change, and thereby provides a means for strengthening community capacity at many levels.
ABCD as a project came together to advance the field of public deliberation, and to explore how public deliberation can advance public and state responses to the challenge of climate change. We hope that this volume communicates our learning in ways that help others to engage the public on the many grave and wicked problems facing our societies.
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