7. On the Ground

Practitioners Reflect on ABCD’s Citizen Deliberations

Mary Pat MacKinnon, Jacquie Dale, and Susanna Haas Lyons

This chapter reflects the vantage points of three citizen deliberation practitioners deeply involved in the design and facilitation of three Alberta Climate Dialogue projects: the Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges (Edmonton Panel); Water in a Changing Climate (WCC); and Alberta Energy Efficiency Choices (AEEC). Jacquie Dale and Mary Pat MacKinnon were co-designers and co-facilitators of the Edmonton Panel, Jacquie Dale designed and facilitated the WCC, and Susanna Haas Lyons did the same for AEEC. The first two forums were in-person deliberations, while the third was conducted via a web conferencing system, with optional telephone access, and enabled participants to meet in both small groups and plenary sessions. As practitioners, we collectively bring over fifty years of experience in designing, facilitating, analyzing, reporting on, researching, and evaluating deliberative dialogue on many complex topics, for a range of different purposes (including policy, community development and action, and citizen learning), and using a variety of formats and technologies.

Deliberation theorists claim that citizens have a right and a responsibility to be active participants in democracy (Gutmann and Thompson 2004), are capable of doing so (Warren and Pearse 2007; Rose 2007; Lukensmeyer 2012), and that the act of participation builds their capacity (Woodruff 2005; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015; Prikken, Burall, and Kattirtzi 2011). Climate change discourses and practices have also enshrined the role of citizen participation (UN 1992, 2015). As practitioners who advocate for deliberative democracy, our design and facilitation approaches to all three deliberations were grounded in these normative (i.e., in the sense that citizens have a legitimate right to participate) and theoretical (i.e., concerning citizen capacity and skills building and the role of values in deliberation) constructs.

Our approach to facilitation of the ABCD deliberations was also guided by what Carl Rogers calls the three core conditions for facilitative practice: realness, acceptance, and empathy (Smith 1997, 2004). We strive to attend to participants’ emotional and learning needs. As facilitators, we have a responsibility to assess and balance the quantity and intensity of learning and deliberation requirements with citizens’ needs for a safe, constructive, and interesting environment to do their work.

In this chapter, we examine three dimensions of central importance to deliberative practice: issue framing, planning for mini-public deliberations, and enabling citizen deliberation.

Issue framing in climate change deliberations: Framing is about determining how an issue or problem is presented and structured. How to frame an issue is a key decision in planning a climate change (or any) deliberation (Barisione 2012; Kettering Foundation 2011). Issue framing influences what and who are included in a deliberative process, how participants are invited to engage with the issue, the scope of the dialogue, and the range of actions being considered (see chapters 2 and 5). Of course, who or what is leading the issue framing is also critical. In this section, we explore the challenges of framing a hugely complex issue like climate change, and the importance of context, opportunity for policy impact, and our partners’ expectations and optics about the framing process.

Planning for mini-public deliberative dialogues: Mini-public is a term used for deliberations that bring together, either virtually and/or face-to-face, a limited number of people who reflect certain characteristics of the broader population. In this section, we explore the particular challenges of recruiting and preparing participants for such deliberations as well as the impact that the partners’ goals had on the methodologies employed in the three ABCD projects.

Enabling citizen deliberation: Designing and implementing deliberation for and with citizens brings to the fore certain considerations. This section explores four of these: the importance of values as a critical contribution of citizens; the need for and role of topical knowledge; respect for participant diversity, including perspectives, ways of knowing, experiences, values, education, and ideological world views; and the challenges of citizen ownership and group power dynamics.

Throughout the chapter, we share the challenges that emerged during these deliberations, how we responded, and what we see as strengths, gaps, and remaining questions. The conclusion highlights some key learnings and issues meriting further consideration by practitioners, academics, and decision makers.

Issue Framing in Climate Change Deliberations

Challenge: Complexities of Climate Change Framing

In our role as designers and facilitators, we were very aware that climate change, as a topic for deliberation, presented layered complexities. As a super wicked problem (Levin et al. 2012), efforts to simplify climate change are confounded by its uncertain, unpredictable, indeterminate, and interdependent nature. Furthermore, climate change operates on a time scale beyond the experience of decision makers and citizens alike, making it difficult for citizens to grapple with for many reasons: it is distant from everyday concerns, it is hard to disentangle causation and consequences, and it requires holistic actions involving multiple actors across jurisdictions.

How do we work to help citizens to deliberate on climate change-related issues without becoming so immobilized that they feel powerless to effect real change? We looked to climate psychology for some guidance on framing the issue. There is a substantial and growing body of social science research suggesting that it is counterproductive to present climate change primarily in terms of fear and dire threats to the globe, which can create participant paralysis or anxiety. A more positive orientation is recommended where citizens see themselves as agents of change who are able to overcome hopelessness or fatalism (Pike, Doppelt and Herr, 2010; Goleman 2013, ch.14).

In all three ABCD projects, we explored climate change from more local or provincial perspectives: the Edmonton Panel initiative was at a city scale, the WCC deliberation focused on a watershed view, and the AEEC deliberation had a provincial focus. The strength of this approach was that people explored what climate change meant for them and what they could do about it in their local contexts.

Climate change is an emergent issue; despite the best modelling, we cannot know with certainty what it will look like in communities in twelve, twenty, or fifty years. This uncertainty requires a participatory approach that supports people in engaging over the long term in taking responsible action in their communities. We focused on ways of empowering participants to deliberate on what communities can and need to do to address the intractable issues of energy transition and climate change, taking an iterative approach to this task. The in-person deliberations included materials and presenters on the national and global dimensions of climate change, but given our framing and time constraints this input was limited. The online deliberation referred to the relationship between energy use and climate change, but it did not elaborate on the complexities of climate change. As well, we had to invest time to become more familiar with the critical research and arguments relevant to the Alberta context.

Making the issue of climate change manageable and something we could tackle with limited time and resources also meant examining a defined set of attributes such as energy resiliency, and ignoring other attributes and responses, such as the impact of climate change on species. These framing approaches were developed collaboratively with our ABCD convening partners and revolved around issues that were core to their mandates and/or to a specific policy opportunity. As a result, it sometimes felt as if we were focusing on things not normally connected to climate change, or of minor impact given the global scale of climate change, for example, energy efficiency for a city vehicle fleet. However, in order to advance, we need to limit our examination of climate change to the lenses of energy transition, energy efficiency, or water management.

Challenge: Policy Context and Convening Partners’ Perspectives

Deliberation context encompasses the policy context, setting, and relationships in which deliberation occurs, and the powerful reality that these always matter in designing and delivering citizen deliberations (Abelson and Gauvin 2006). This is even more the case when the deliberation topic involves climate change. As chapter 3 of this volume describes, all three deliberations took place in Alberta, a province whose wealth has been historically heavily dependent on fossil fuels.

When opportunities arose to host a deliberation that could potentially influence a live policy decision, ABCD was keen. This was the impetus for the longest and most expensive deliberative undertaking—the Edmonton Panel—as well as the AEEC project. But these policy opportunities came with an inherent framing for discussion and trade-offs about what to exclude, or at least to minimize, in the deliberation.

The opportunity presented to ABCD offered by the City of Edmonton to shape policy heavily influenced our willingness to trade off a narrower scoping of the Edmonton Panel deliberations than might have otherwise been the case. The policy options were contained in the city’s Energy Transition Discussion Paper, a background document written by energy efficiency experts that details three scenarios for energy transition within Edmonton. Our city partners were looking to citizens to provide guidance on which path to follow and which policy levers to pull. The discussion paper was technical and assumed a fairly high level of literacy and understanding of policy and science. As the lead guide for citizens, the discussion paper shaped the framing and the content for deliberation in significant ways. For example, the implications of Alberta being an energy powerhouse dominated by its carbon-intensive oil sands were not a focus of discussion. Also, Alberta’s large carbon footprint, predominantly a result of the extraction, processing, and transportation of fossil fuels, was not a significant aspect of the citizens’ deliberations apart from the discussion around the provincial energy grid’s heavy reliance on coal.

Energy use also came to the fore in the AEEC deliberations. ABCD’s partner in this exercise, the Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance (AEEA), felt that a discussion of energy efficiency, as opposed to other aspects of climate change, would have the greatest potential to influence provincial policy. The AEEA identified two areas where informed public input would be most useful for its engagement with government actors: energy efficiency regulation and funding. The first portion of the deliberation asked participants to consider options for funding provincial energy efficiency programs. The second portion considered if and how new energy efficiency regulations should be established. Some participants appreciated the opportunity to provide input on issues of importance to government, while other participants struggled with and objected to the narrow framing. As one AEEA participant remarked, “the focus was so narrow but it allowed for an in-depth consideration of one part of a bigger picture.”

A different approach was taken in the WCC deliberation, as there was no immediate policy opportunity around which to focus citizen input. ABCD’s partner in this event was the Oldman Watershed Council (OWC), a not-for-profit multi-stakeholder group. Since the OWC’s interest was more in the process than the outcomes of the deliberation, the framing for this one-day deliberation was largely in the hands of the ABCD team. Water was chosen as the broad issue for deliberation, which aligned well with OWC’s focus on its watershed. Within this broad framing, citizens identified their concerns about climate change and water in their region and clustered these into themes, which then became the topics for deliberation.

How We Responded

In the Edmonton Panel, the discussion paper’s technical and more circumscribed framing was counterbalanced in several ways: a participant handbook was developed to provide additional information on and framing of climate change, and a variety of presenters and resource people introduced a range of perspectives on climate change. Early in the process, we took citizens through a discovery of their own values in relation to energy transition and climate change, asking them to identify what values they believed should guide deliberation on the recommendations; and we continually invited participants to consider their own and others’ interests and perspectives.

On balance, the city’s objectives did not stymie citizen deliberation. Citizen panelists were able to place their deliberation in a broader context of climate change while still feeding directly into a policy opportunity, which for many made the deliberation more meaningful. For example, the participants urged the city to “Go faster, Go further,” emphasizing that the city must set strong, measurable targets for energy transition in a five-year time frame (CPEECC 2013). And, even though the technical overlay and limited scope of the discussion paper constrained the panelists and resulted in some frustration, it also led to creative thinking as participants found ways to introduce new ideas or priorities, such as fiscal prudence and sensitivity to the vulnerability of lower-income Edmontonians to cost increases. Allocating time for and encouraging emergent thinking were essential design approaches to enable these kinds of outcomes.

The AEEC deliberation focused on issues the Government of Alberta was considering action on but on which it wanted guidance about value-informed choices, such as who should shoulder the financial burden of energy efficiency programs and what sectors should be regulated. Even with this constrained agenda, small group discussions were designed so that participants could raise related issues they cared about and pose questions (typed or spoken) during plenaries. As well, the training session for small group facilitators encouraged them to be responsive to participants’ interest areas. In practice, however, challenges associated with the technology used to allow participants to join remotely, such as audio quality, and the constrained timelines meant that some discussion groups had difficulty getting beyond the assigned task to more deeply explore trade-offs or related issues. Plenary sessions were more responsive to participant agenda setting through convenor/participant exchanges in the online chat area, and oral question and answer exchanges.

The WCC deliberation was intentionally designed as a counterpoint to the Edmonton Panel deliberation in some key ways. ABCD was interested to see what could be accomplished in a one-day session with a more limited budget. The interest, in particular, was to experiment with an approach to deliberation that not-for-profits and communities could easily take on. The day-long session included a presentation on climate change in southern Alberta, the identification and clustering of concerns into issue areas, and subsequent deliberation on these areas of focus.

Strengths, Gaps, and Questions

The policy opportunities and the community contexts within which the projects were conceived, combined with the limited time and resources available, shaped the deliberations and posed challenges and opportunities for us as designers and facilitators. In the Edmonton Panel, we struggled with making the process rigorous enough to be taken seriously as useful policy input by City Administration and Council, while working to make space for emergent and other perspectives from participants. Participants achieved a high level of consensus on the recommendations presented. However, with the notable exception of panelists defining a new recommendation for the city to “Go faster, Go further” on energy transition and carbon reduction in the second last session, they largely confined themselves to the policy options presented in the discussion paper. While the panel members ably performed their citizenship tasks, and the results of the deliberation did have an impact on the subsequent policy decision, we were left to wonder what sparks of creativity that might have resulted in additional or different directions were lost.

In the AEEC deliberations, some participants wanted to discuss energy production in Alberta but were constrained by the focus on energy efficiency regulation and funding and the related opportunity to inform government policy. The narrow framing enabled AEEA to draw on the deliberation results in its engagement with the Alberta government on this topic. Undoubtedly, more time would have provided some flexibility in the agenda for participants to discuss additional issues—such as climate change’s global aspects and/or Alberta’s energy production. If participants had been invited to discuss these issues, they might have expressed a broader range of ideas and become more interested in the related issues.

The WCC dialogue was rich and rewarding for participants, and the OWC learned much about the process of deliberation, but the ideas developed through the deliberation have not been acted on. According to the OWC’s executive director, this is because the Council has not yet made climate change a part of its strategy, and before it would act on the WCC recommendations, it would conduct more dialogues with other people in other communities (Frank 2015). In many ways, the most visible outcome of the WCC deliberation was OWC’s and the participants’ learning in terms of discovering a new way to talk. When participants framed their concerns into the issues for deliberation, it allowed for diverse and creative topics on the issue of water to surface. This framing was also influenced by the context participants brought into the room. For example, one of the issues participants identified for deliberation was extreme weather events, a top-of mind concern given the catastrophic flood the region had experienced the summer before the deliberation.

Planning for Mini-Public Deliberative Dialogues

Challenge: Recruit Diverse Mini-Publics

All three of the deliberations ABCD led were mini-publics. We took this approach to move beyond the “usual suspects” (e.g., those who are most vocal and organized and most likely to show up), in order to gather a cross-section of perspectives and experiences that are reflective of the community. Citizens bring different points of view, ways of knowing, experiences, values, education, and ideologies to an issue, and these all influence a deliberation. But mini-publics are challenging from a design perspective. They demand methods and techniques to ensure that all voices are heard, that learning approaches appeal to diverse participants with different learning style preferences, and that power differentials among participants are minimized. Methods and approaches must be designed to bridge participants’ different ways of knowing and learning, and to support them in exploring common ground, while protecting space for divergence and differences.

How We Responded

The type of recruitment or selection process used varied with the nature of the opportunity (see chapter 4). For the Edmonton Panel, where our city partners and their senior managers felt it was critical that the panel reflect the diversity of Edmontonians, a more rigorous, statistically valid process was needed than in the WCC deliberation. The City of Edmonton and AEEA wanted the citizen panels to reflect the larger population on a number of demographic measures and mirror diverse attitudes on energy and climate change, and so a public opinion research firm was contracted to recruit participants. However, a professional third party was not used to recruit participants for the WCC deliberation. Instead, recruitment was largely done through public service announcements in local papers, word-of-mouth, and contact lists coming from the OWC. The WCC also employed targeted recruitment, such as for First Nations people, which was largely successful and added to the diversity of perspectives and patterns of discourse.

Strengths, Gaps, and Questions

Lower-budget, shorter deliberations like WCC are more vulnerable to the effects of whatever burning issues or preoccupations people bring into the room with them than longer deliberations like the Edmonton Panel. For example, while WCC recruitment included some attitudinal dimensions, it was not possible to compare the range of participants’ attitudes to a broader population poll as was done in the Edmonton Panel deliberation. In addition, while attempts were made to recruit broadly for the WCC, several participants learned about the deliberation from the OWC electronic mailing list and hence were familiar with the Council and its work. This influenced participants’ ability in two interesting ways. Some self-selected small groups used their pre-existing knowledge to leapfrog the discussion into new areas, whereas another discussion group had difficulty moving beyond the usual conversation around their issue area.

The AEEC participants were also less diverse than the Edmonton Panel due to drop-off between initial recruitment and sign-up for the deliberation sessions, as well as technological challenges citizens experienced in accessing the deliberation. Only about one-third of those recruited participated, which limited the diversity of views heard. On average the participants had higher levels of education than the typical Albertan. We are left wondering what messages and interactions by both the recruiter and ABCD would have increased turnout. Nonetheless, some participants valued the opportunity to hear others’ perspectives, as noted by this AEEC participant: the deliberation “made me aware of others’ viewpoints and that they are often very different from mine. I changed my mind on some topics as a result of this input.”

Challenge: Align Deliberation Methodologies with Partners’ Goals and Resources

Partnerships enriched the design, planning, and facilitation of ABCD’s deliberations at all stages, but they also made for more complex processes. The convening teams included deliberation practitioners, government officials, not-for-profit representatives, policy advocates, and researchers. Implementing the deliberations brought together citizen participants, lead facilitators, small group facilitators and note takers, researchers, and administrative support. ABCD’s collaborating partners came from different institutional contexts and were driven by different considerations. This impacted and influenced the choices of design and methods used to engage participants, including participant tasks, length of time for and approaches to learning and deliberating, decision-making methods, approach to note taking and small group facilitation, reporting, and more. This presented advantages and challenges for us as designers and facilitators.

How We Responded

The duration of the Edmonton Panel, spanning six Saturdays (early October to early December), was dictated in large degree by available resources and our city partners’ view of what they perceived to be the outside limit of citizens’ willingness and capacity to volunteer their time. As it turned out, with a few exceptions, the panelists’ attendance record was excellent, as was their level of engagement. Another important influence on the structure of the Edmonton Panel was the City’s request for detailed session-by-session design and material descriptions in advance of the panel launch. ABCD willingly provided these as a way to instill confidence in the robustness of the process on the part of our city partners and small group facilitators. In reality, each session required new design thinking, additional work, and the creation of new materials, all of which translated into a requirement for just-in-time responsiveness from the on-site team. As lead facilitators and process designers, going into the dialogue we knew from experience that the process needed to be iterative, building on what had happened in previous sessions. We also knew what citizens required for informed, meaningful dialogue, and what interested and energized them (MacKinnon, Dale, and Schrader 2014). We employed design strategies that allowed aspects of the process to emerge, such as using electronic keypad voting for deciding which recommendations to include in the report; using open space methods that allow citizens to self-organize around topics of interest (Owen 1997) in the deliberation; incorporating a climate change psychology presentation in a session; and nimbly shifting agendas and tasks to accommodate participants’ diverse energy levels and psychological states.

As the WCC deliberation did not feed into a concrete, specific opportunity, the deliberation was designed to be highly responsive to participants’ interests and the areas for deliberation and accompanying values. This approach was beneficial for exploring climate change–related topics through unusual lenses, which has the potential to uncover creative solutions. As examples, participants in the group discussing social justice and responsibility recommended fostering individual stewardship for development of the common good and the group deliberating on environment and human health developed the idea of advocating for and supporting sustainable food production in urban centres.

The AEEC’s distributed format enabled people from across Alberta to participate in the deliberation, regardless of location, which helped to meet AEEA’s objective of relevancy for the provincial government. Additionally, the cost-effectiveness of the online/phone format was influential in choosing this method over options such as a handful of small meetings in various locations throughout the province. Given these parameters, the AEEC deliberation was designed in response to the idea that citizens wanted to give their input but were likely not willing to participate online for extended periods of time. This translated into involving each participant in a single two-hour online session.

Strengths, Gaps, and Questions

The structures of the Edmonton Panel, WCC, and AEEC each constrained participants’ involvement in specific ways. In the Edmonton Panel, we wonder whether having an additional Saturday or two might have resulted in deeper deliberations on critical issues, greater clarity on some of the trade-offs required, and broader articulation of additional recommendations and options. While several of the recommendations resulting from the WCC were novel (Frank 2015), they were not necessarily within the mandate of the OWC, nor was the process designed to generate citizen action. In addition, the emergent nature of the process (in which the areas of focus for the afternoon’s deliberation arose from the morning’s input), put significant pressures on the small group volunteer facilitators, who did not know what themes they would be working on in the afternoon. With hindsight, this design probably necessitated a higher level of facilitation skill and deliberation experience than some of the facilitators possessed, even with some training the day before the event.

The AEEC’s online/phone format enabled a province-wide conversation; however, the short time frame constrained the amount of time participants engaged with the issues and one another. Further testing of the assumptions that participants would be reluctant to join a session that was longer than two hours or attend multiple sessions would have provided some useful information to guide the deliberation structure. In addition, offering an optional and short, advance preparatory session for people new to the technology would have alleviated some of the technological challenges of using an unfamiliar-to-some tool. Modifying the format of interaction is another option that could be considered, such as offering a traditional webinar that primarily presents information to attendees, which could then be followed up with small group discussions via conference call, using a service such as MaestroConference.

Challenge: Support Participants’ Learning and Deliberations

Achieving informed participation is widely accepted as essential for good deliberation, but there is no single answer as to what constitutes informed participation and it is not unusual for different partners to have different interpretations of this. For example, in the Edmonton Panel there was a healthy tension between ABCD and the city partners, who were interested in ensuring that participants were as knowledgeable as possible about the science and technological aspects of Edmonton’s energy and climate challenges so that their recommendations would be as informed as possible (see chapter 6). While agreeing with the need for informed participation, we were skeptical of the assumption that greater quantities of knowledge and information necessarily translate into learning and deliberation. The purpose of deliberative dialogue is not to transform citizens into policy experts and have citizen engagement replace expert deliberation or input, especially around complex issues laden with technicalities and specialized knowledge. Also, in our experience, too much information can become overwhelming.

Citizens contribute in terms of other important policy-making considerations, primarily the clarification and prioritization of values. Engagement processes should provide a coherent view on how different pieces fit together and not necessarily communicate all available information (Harwood Group 1993). Hence, our objectives were to enable focused learning, in concert with values-based discernment and thoughtful consideration of the trade-offs that are inevitably embedded within different choices, to arrive at reasoned recommendations or advice on preferred directions or decisions. We also felt it critical to acknowledge and address the emotional dimensions of climate change, which required a different type of learning.

How We Responded

A participant handbook was used in each of the three deliberations. These primers provided information on issues from global and local perspectives, outlined key concepts of scientific uncertainty and risk, described deliberation and the role of values within this, and included a glossary of terms. In all three deliberations, the handbook was provided in advance and the majority of participants stated that they had read it before the discussion. Indeed, for AEEC, a poll taken during the discussions showed that 91 per cent of respondents had reviewed the participant guide in advance, providing a shared foundation for the deliberation.

Each of the handbooks had its own nuances, given the nature of the issue being explored and the deliberation format. For example, the Edmonton Panel handbook was a companion document to the highly technical Energy Transition Discussion Paper. It was designed to demystify climate change as well as provide the range of information noted previously. The WCC handbook introduced a social justice dimension to climate change. For AEEC, this primer oriented participants to their role, provided information designed to provide a common foundation of knowledge for all participants, and supplied detailed points about funding and regulation to consider for each discussion.

Scientific technical information was also provided in other formats. The WCC and Edmonton deliberations included informational presentations and panels. For example, in the WCC deliberation, a climate scientist made a presentation on climate change’s probable impacts on southern Alberta. For the Edmonton Panel we invited experts from the city to go deeper into the discussion paper, followed by a carousel process in which participants rotated through small group discussions of the discussion paper’s six goals. City staff served as resource people and participants were encouraged to identify what additional knowledge and information they needed to be able to move ahead with their deliberations. These presentations and panels gave participants the opportunity to ask questions and test out their own experiences/observations.

Given its duration, in the Edmonton Panel we were especially concerned with not overwhelming the participants with data, facts, and research. We deliberately did not front-load the sessions with reams of technical and scientific facts and figures. Instead we chose to introduce critical information iteratively and in response to participant requests through weekly reports that summarized previous session highlights, and previews of the coming sessions, with links to additional resources. In addition, during the opening session participants explored and shared their hopes and fears about different possible energy and climate change futures through the use of two scenarios (status quo and aggressive action). Encouraging participants to connect personally with this issue and share and listen to others’ points of view helped to make climate change and energy transition more real for them.

It was also important to bring participant knowledge into the deliberation and provide opportunities for people to share and learn from lived experience. This was done, for example, by ensuring diversity of views through predetermining small group composition and allowing time for sharing of stories in both full and small group settings. In the WCC deliberation, this was taken a step further by designing a process that was sensitive to the participation of people from First Nations communities. This included requesting input from one First Nations participant into the process design and incorporating artwork from another participant on the backgrounder. The deliberation itself opened with a welcome and prayer, and time was provided for First Nations participants to share their experiences of how the climate was changing in the region and the impact this was having.

Strengths, Gaps, and Questions

While considerable time and resources were invested in the creation of the participant handbooks, overall they seemed to have been an underutilized learning and deliberation resource, especially in the Edmonton Panel. The reasons for this are not entirely clear to us, but one factor might be that we were often squeezing so much into each session that our references to the handbook might have seemed an afterthought rather than central to the participants’ program of learning. At the end of each session, we included a preview of the next session with recommended reading from the handbook, but we might have provided additional prompts during the week to remind participants to review the material and contact us with questions and comments. However, we were balancing concern about potentially overtaxing them between sessions with a desire that they do some advance thinking on upcoming session topics. Overall, we think that well-crafted and balanced participant handbooks are a valuable aid to citizen learning and deliberation. However, to maximize their benefit for citizens and outcomes, they need to be explicitly woven into the deliberation process, and assessed and augmented as required.

We struggled with, and continue to wrestle with, questions about balance: How much learning and knowledge acquisition is enough for good deliberation among diverse participants? How much deliberation is enough for reasoned recommendations? What appropriate measures should we use to determine if participants are sufficiently informed to come to reasoned judgments on the issues at hand? These are all questions that, particularly for the Edmonton Panel, required continuous and iterative discussion with our partners. At one point, for example, the City asked to test panelists’ knowledge and we reluctantly agreed to use keypads for this purpose. Our reluctance was due in part to our concern about what this “quiz” might signal to panelists if their knowledge was found wanting, and in part to the limitations of what binary, yes/no answers reveal about citizen knowledge. Fortunately, all panelists passed the quiz and there were no negative reactions to it! These processes served to build greater trust between the city and participants but also between the city partners and the project team. We continued to have different views on how much scientific and technical knowledge was needed for good deliberation. While acknowledging these differences, the ABCD team and its city partners came to better appreciate and respond to each other’s respective perspectives and fears and to sharpen collaboration processes as a result (see chapter 6 for a more detailed discussion of the collaboration).

Enabling Citizen Deliberation

Challenge: Leverage the Unique Contributions of Citizens

A core dimension of citizen deliberation focuses on citizen values and value tension (internal and collective) in helping participants come to reasoned and ethical choices about policy options (Pidgeon et al. 2014). Citizens are invited to reflect on what values should guide government as it makes decisions and what value tensions need to be addressed. They are asked to apply those values to the issue(s) at hand, including thinking through the trade-offs that they are willing to make for the collective good. In most citizen deliberations, a discussion of values is crucial because the policy choices cannot or should not be made on technical or scientific grounds only.

How We Responded

Values work was integrated, to a greater or lesser extent in each of the three deliberations, to help ground participants’ learning and reinforce their unique role as citizens in a democracy. We utilized adult education approaches, which stress the importance of experiential and hands-on learning, and principles for effective dialogue and deliberation, which recognize participants’ competencies and learning needs (McCoy and Scully 2002; Schwartz 2002; Gastil 2014; Synapcity 2016). We worked to convey the idea that policy and action choices privilege different value choices, and we asked participants to be conscious and explicit about what value choices they were making as they deliberated on recommendations and came to decisions.

In both the Edmonton Panel and the WCC deliberations, an early presentation on values was scheduled that covered what values are, including how they differ from preferences and interests, and their place in family, community, and democratic life. This was done to orient participants to ways in which values could be integrated into their learning and deliberation on climate change. Then participants identified priority values that connected to the issues at hand for them. For example, in the Edmonton Panel, participants individually and then collectively, in small groups and then all together, identified priority values to guide their learning and deliberation, and discussed the meaning of each priority value to build shared understanding. Panelists used electronic keypads to select their top four priority values to serve as guideposts for their work together. This helped ensure that everyone’s preferences were registered in determining the most important values and avoided having dominant and more powerful voices unduly influence decisions. The fourth session featured an expert’s presentation on the psychology of climate change action and the alignment and misalignment of values with actions. This was designed to deepen panelists’ understanding of the internal barriers and fears we face around climate change. We also invited participants to connect with their own experiences and to explore scenarios that depicted typical Edmontonians representing different lifestyles, values, and perspectives on climate change and energy. This was employed to help participants consider divergent and conflicting points of view, and the underlying values held by different Edmonton residents. The Edmonton Panel’s final recommendations and report featured four value-driven principles and a core set of four values: sustainability, equity, quality of life, and balancing individual freedom and the public good.

In AEEC, participants were tasked with considering a range of policy options and describing the conditions that would enable them to support a particular option. Participants were not asked to identify shared values to apply to these issues; instead each participant drew from her or his own personal values. For example, social justice was a value brought to bear on the discussion; the impact of a policy on low- and fixed-income homes was the most common issue raised in two of the four discussion areas. Other values underlying participant recommendations included cost-efficiency, transparency, accountability, and equity.

Strengths, Gaps, and Questions

The Edmonton Panel pre- and post-surveys and participant feedback at the sessions gave us some confidence that we had done a reasonable job of incorporating values into participants’ learning, deliberation, and decision making. However, we heard from a minority of panelists that they were not convinced of the “value of values.” They seemed to be unable to connect their values with the choices to be made and were looking for more information and research to help them to decide. This is not unusual in citizen deliberation, as many people are not used to thinking explicitly about values. With more time, we could have worked more with these individuals to better respond to their points of view, to understand why the values orientation did not resonate with them, and explore more deeply their unease. As well, a more explicit focus on the alignment between panelists’ espoused values and their decision making around recommendations, including the emergent “Go faster, Go further” recommendation, might have resulted in a different order of thinking about the solutions required—beyond what the discussion paper provided. For example, for each recommendation, the report could have included an explanation of how participants aligned their position on the recommendation with their values and associated trade-offs.

In WCC, the values and concerns articulated in the morning were clustered into themes that became the key areas of discussion for the afternoon breakout groups. Given this, several of the themes included values as part of the cluster of ideas linked to that theme. One theme, social justice and responsibility, was expressed in values terms, and the recommendations continued to embed values (e.g., foster individual stewardship for development of the common good). For other themes and the recommendations on these, there was less explicit use of values. It is hard to move from the language of values into tangible recommendations. As citizens, we are not accustomed to doing this, and it is difficult to achieve in a one-day deliberation.

From our perspective, the early work on values, though not without its challenges, proved its worth. It helped to validate the importance of what citizens bring to the table in contrast to feeling that the deliberation was only about what was technically the best solution(s). For complex issues that require action by citizens (as well as society actors, including government and private sector agencies), aligning policy with values will have the most likelihood of success (Yankelovich 1991; Burall 2015). If the best technical solution rubs up against core values that are fundamental to the issue at hand, the solution may be resisted.

In our collective experience, it is important for citizen deliberation to go beyond the pronouncement of values important to the issue. While many of us share a bedrock of values, tensions can arise when we have to prioritize those values in considering the issue at hand. Understanding the public judgment citizens arrive at through deliberation is not complete without understanding how people have prioritized the critical values and the trade-offs they have made in doing so.

Challenge: Respect Participants’ Diverse Life Experiences, Ideologies, Education, Expertise, and Ways of Knowing

The diversity of participants’ life experiences captured in each of ABCD’s deliberations, combined with the complex issues we asked participants to wrestle with, meant that it was particularly important that learning and deliberation materials, methods, and presenters were accessible for different needs, personalities, and circumstances. This is true of most deliberative dialogues that involve diverse participants. But layered on top of that was our challenge of ensuring that participants had a reasonable grasp of the key dimensions of energy transition and water and climate change. We worked hard to ensure that we were not triggering fear, intimidation, or avoidance.

How We Responded

In the Edmonton Panel and WCC deliberations we employed varied learning and deliberation methods to meet the diverse needs of the participants. Small group and plenary exercises were designed to respond and appeal to different adult learning preferences and aptitudes. While there was a strong cognitive orientation to the plenary learning sessions, the small group and some plenary exercises reflected experiential learning approaches that featured concrete experience, observation, reflection, thinking about concepts, and applying new knowledge (Schwartz 2002). These exercises included participants’ use of photographs to elicit hopes, fears, and values; graphic presentations of group work to appeal to different ways of understanding; physical movement to activate different parts of participants’ brains; and choices about discussion topics to allow participants to focus their energy on what was most relevant to them. While deliberation theorists often emphasize highly rational and cognitive aspects of deliberation (Habermas and Outhwaite 1996), our experience is that emotional and social dimensions of group deliberation are also very important and need to be attended to with equal care (Gastil 2014; Goleman 2006).

An important way of attending to participants’ needs in all three projects was having teams of small group facilitators and note takers who had received prior training and orientation and whom we supported throughout the deliberation with detailed process guides, resource materials, and pre- and post-session briefings. The use of small group facilitators and note takers is a common practice in engagement work. But there are common challenges associated with the practice due to the sophistication of facilitation required for deliberation processes. Nonetheless, teams alerted us to challenging behaviours and situations so they could be addressed quickly before participants became distracted or stressed. This was critical to creating a safe and comfortable space for participants.

Strengths, Gaps, and Questions

As one might expect, the shorter the deliberation the harder it is to incorporate varied learning approaches. In the WCC deliberation we were able to use physical movement, small group and plenary work, visual methods such as the clustering activity, self-selection, and designated groups, but iterative learning processes were not a feature, as it was only a one-day session. For the AEEC deliberation, the two-hour time frame, made even shorter due to technology issues, limited the application of mixed methods. In most small group discussions, there was insufficient time for going beyond sharing participant views into a deliberative weighing of trade-offs and options, and there were few instances of facilitators having enough time to learn about participants’ needs and alter the program accordingly. In the Edmonton Panel, however, we were able to incorporate a diversity of learning and deliberation methods to respond to the diversity of participants’ needs and preferences. Still, we wonder if additional or different approaches might have been even more powerful in helping participants engage with the issues more deeply and holistically, and with a greater sense of ownership. For example, organizing field visits to Edmonton neighbourhoods or utility facilities, or allowing opportunities for more hands-on experiences might have contributed to other ways of thinking about energy transition and climate change in Edmonton and beyond.

Challenge: Be Attentive to Participant Ownership and Power Dynamics

We worked to design processes that did not privilege the already privileged (i.e., those who have higher education and are cognitively advanced and verbally articulate) and to address emerging power dynamics as they arose. We know that participants with higher education, more outgoing personalities, more experience speaking in groups, and more exposure to diverse situations are more likely to feel comfortable and confident about their participation (Hobbs 2013).

The context and purpose of a deliberation help to guide the level of ownership the project partners hope to engender in participants over the course of the dialogue. In some processes, it is quite appropriate for participants to deliberate and then walk away, having provided their best thinking to the hosts. Indeed, in policy processes, a common participant comment is that they are glad they don’t have to actually make a decision given their new-found appreciation for how complex such policy/decision making is, and given the complexity of the issue and the different perspectives, interests, and values that have to be considered. In the WCC and the AEEC deliberations, the process was not designed to build long-term ownership of the results or move people to action. However, in the Edmonton panel, participants were encouraged and lightly supported to stay involved as their advice moved to City Council.

How We Responded

For those less comfortable speaking in large groups, their input and perspectives can be lost unless processes are designed to explicitly enable them to comfortably participate and contribute. To help achieve the active participation of all citizens in all three deliberations, we used a mix of small group and plenary processes. The small groups were facilitated to help participants live up to the ground rules of dialogue that they had created, one of which was “share the air time.” We also varied the type of activities so that there were moments when different learning styles could shine; for example, those who prefer expressing ideas visually rather than through words, or in the case of the online deliberation, using typed comments rather than voice-based discussion. For the in-person deliberations, we also incorporated time for individual reflection and followed this with sharing in groups of varying sizes. As we got to know people, we also assigned specific individuals to different groups to help balance the power dynamics, for example, putting all the dominant extroverts in one group, which freed up other groups from dealing with the dominant personalities.

For the Edmonton Panel, we provided structured and iterative processes for the deliberation, and redesigned on the spot in response to what was emerging in the discussion in order to help participants come to decisions on their recommendations. The better part of a day was scheduled for participants to identify their level of agreement for goals and activities, identify their trade-offs, and consider what values underpinned their choices. The use of keypads in the Edmonton Panel was particularly important in making a more level playing field for all participants and in ensuring transparency. Voting was anonymous and results were immediate, not filtered through an intermediary. The keypads were used throughout the panel process as icebreakers, to test knowledge, and to capture the pulse of the room; they were critical for the deliberation and decision-making phases, especially for voting on recommendations. For example, the recommendation that the city should “Go faster, Go further” to achieve greater carbon reductions was voted on in session five and then revised in the final session with a new vote, securing support from 63 per cent of participants. In thinking about the way in which this recommendation emerged and how participants navigated this, we draw a few conclusions. First, citizens felt empowered to bring their own reasoned and values-based recommendations into the deliberation. Second, participants and facilitators co-created a decision process around which recommendations to include and how to include them in their report (with 63 per cent agreement the “Go faster, Go further” recommendation fell short of the 75 per cent agreement required for inclusion). This process showed a sophisticated progression in their citizenship capacities to learn, deliberate, and decide.

In the WCC deliberation, a sense of ownership was built through the framing process in the morning, and then participants self-selected which of the resulting issue areas they wished to work on in the afternoon.

Participant-prepared reports also create a sense of ownership for both the deliberation process and the results. Of the three deliberations, only the Edmonton Panel incorporated this approach. It was a clear expectation from the beginning that the volunteer members of the panel would take a lead responsibility in overseeing the report writing, checking back with the whole group and drawing support from ABCD as needed. A core group of panelists presented the report to Executive Committee of Edmonton City Council in April 2013. The report informed the Implementation Strategy for Edmonton’s Energy Transition Strategy, which was presented and accepted/approved by Council in 2015. The core group of citizen panelists were present both times. For the other two deliberations, a report was developed from note takers’ and facilitators’ notes of participant discussions.

AEEC sent a preliminary report to participants for their feedback before the final report was prepared and distributed back to them. AEEC made use of the findings in its engagement with the Government of Alberta in winter 2014.

Strengths, Gaps, and Questions

Despite our best efforts as designers and facilitators, we know that in time-limited deliberations we cannot eliminate all power imbalances among participants. So much of this happens at a subconscious level that we may not be fully aware it is going on (Choudhury 2015). When the power imbalance becomes visible, we can address it through design and facilitation processes. We also have to anticipate power dynamics and work to mitigate their effect, using techniques such as those described above, with the goal of ensuring that all voices are heard and respected (for more discussion on this issue, see chapter 5).

While we worked hard to prevent and mitigate power differentials and to encourage ownership, we are left with some questions. We wonder if providing opportunities for social learning and interaction (e.g., informal dinners or pub nights) might have generated greater group trust, rapport, energy, and ownership of issues (Collins and Ison 2009). Unfortunately, budget and time constraints precluded these options. Nonetheless, we might have thought creatively about ways to encourage more social learning during and outside the formal sessions. For example, we might have offered additional learning and discussion sessions where participants could meet with resource people to discuss topics of particular interest or concern. In addition, we wonder if all three projects could have provided better opportunities for participants to work through what it means to be an effective citizen in relation to energy transition and climate change. Questions such as: “What does being an active citizen mean? What are the ways to effectively engage in policy? And how do I participate in civic life?” are not part of everyday discourse, and our political and media culture does little to encourage such conversation (Synapcity 2016). Given the time constraints of each project, it was difficult to integrate learning and discussions about what it means to be an effective and informed citizen into the deliberation agendas.

Concluding Reflections and Questions

Although we have been practitioners of public deliberation for many years, each new deliberation continues to challenge us, deepening our learning, testing our design and facilitation skills and challenging our thinking. This was especially true of deliberations focused on climate change and energy that occurred in the complex context of a fossil fuel-producing jurisdiction. Our ABCD experience has elicited new understanding of the place and importance of issue framing, participant diversity, working with partners, and putting participant values at the centre of deliberations. It has also heightened the need for personal reflexivity about our roles as designers and facilitators.

During these three deliberations, our personal convictions about the necessity and urgency of decisive action on climate change commingled with a responsibility to design and facilitate successful deliberative processes that would contribute to policy, citizen action, and citizen capacity building. This work was complex and challenging. The issue of climate change can be daunting, disempowering, or discouraging for all of us. Connecting with these emotions was an essential piece of being an effective member of the deliberation team. Participants went through equally, if not more, intense experiences, and as lead facilitators we needed to pay attention to our inner uncertainties before inviting others to do so. Failure to do so, we feared, might have meant that we were not fully present to what was happening in the room—virtual or real. Being aware of our vulnerabilities and triggers, and then working to support each other (in the case of the Edmonton Panel) to ensure we were attuned to participants’ emotional, social, and cognitive needs, took regular reflection and check-ins. We kept asking whether our processes enabled citizens to do their best work and whether they were furthering the best deliberations possible in the real world context within which we were all working.

In addressing these questions we played multiple roles, including those of process experts, partners, collaborators, facilitators, and citizens. We juggled these roles, working to hold our ground on best practices, while also reorienting agendas at the last minute to provide time to accommodate partners’ or researchers’ objectives. On reflection, managing multiple roles and responsibilities is critical to reflexive learning and growth. One lesson we took from our experience is that our growth and development as facilitators will be short-changed if we fail to take the time and space during and after these intense projects for reflective work. Knowing how challenging it is for facilitators to find the time and space for this reflection, we wonder what supporting roles deliberation academics and “pracademics” could play in that regard.

In this chapter, we highlighted the opportunities and constraints of framing issues for deliberation. We believe that deliberations connected to immediate policy opportunities have value and can increase the impact of deliberations, but at the same time, using a systems frame for climate change deliberations could have greater impact on long-term goals. Wrestling with a more complex framing of climate change might empower citizens to come to a more nuanced understanding of the issues. It might also help them to better prioritize issues of greatest importance to them, which could cultivate their interest and capacity for ongoing involvement (see chapter 8). We are left wondering what an agenda would look like that empowers participants to determine if their discussions should focus on the policy opportunity or the issues most important to participants, and what would enable the convener to support such a responsive format.

If institutions and policy makers were to take a longer-term view by engaging with the complexity of climate change now, further resiliency could perhaps be fostered and capacity increased for unanticipated challenges to come. This could be accomplished by institutionalizing public engagement as a regular input into policy formation and other decision making and community action. Sustained opportunities for involvement would provide the time and depth for the public to engage, reflect, and deliberate over a longer term, a requirement for adequately exploring the complexity of climate change issues.

All key decisions for the ABCD deliberations were made in partnership with convenors, researchers, and practitioners. We have observed through ABCD and other projects that it usually takes direct exposure for people new to the field to understand what public deliberation actually is and how much citizens are capable of, and to trust in the unfolding process. It is also true that practitioners are responsible for entering into the mindset and contexts of policy makers and academics in order to understand and respond to their needs and perspectives. Building shared understandings and trust takes time and should not be underestimated. A strong foundation can enable the team to be flexible and to respond effectively to the needs of citizens, while ensuring that all partners feel their needs are still being met through any necessary design changes (see chapter 6).

Ultimately, we think that the needs of participants are the most important drivers in designing climate change deliberations. What do participants need in order to do their best learning, discussing, and deciding? We believe that participants’ work must be rooted in their values, because values are an essential piece of the policy puzzle that the public brings to the table. Yet, in general, citizens are not practised in reflecting on the role of values in public policy choices, so designers should not overestimate people’s ability to talk about and think that way. It might be necessary to support participants in seeing how their values are implicit in the decisions they make: work that is particularly challenging during climate deliberations because there can be both emotional and cognitive dissonance between participants’ world views and their actions. This challenge becomes even more difficult in the face of time limitations.

Understanding the advantages of values-based deliberation is also relevant for decision makers and their supporting institutions (Nabatchi et al., 2012). The ABCD recommendations were based more or less explicitly on values, but sometimes the values themselves were a key outcome, such as with the Edmonton Panel. We also wonder about how institutions interpret and translate those values. Further attention to this area would benefit climate change and other public deliberations. Our experiences have also whetted our appetite to develop innovative approaches to embedding values within citizen learning and deliberation, and we invite practitioners, policy makers, and academics to help us do so.

References

Abelson, Julia, and François-Pierre Gauvin. 2006. Assessing the Impacts of Public Involvement: Concepts, Evidence and Policy Implications. http://www.cprn.org/documents/42669_fr.pdf.

Barisione, Mauro. 2012. “Framing a Deliberation. Deliberative Democracy and the Challenge of Framing Processes.” Journal of Public Deliberation 8(1): art. 2. http://www.publicdeliberation.net/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1176&context=jpd.

Burall, Simon. 2015. Room for a View: Democracy as a Deliberative System. London: Involve. http://www.involve.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Room-for-a-View.pdf.

Choudhury, Shakil. 2015. Deep Diversity: Overcoming Us vs. Them, Toronto: Between the Lines.

Collins, Kevin, and Ray Ison. 2009. “Jumping off Arnstein’s Ladder: Social Learning as a New Policy Paradigm for Climate Change Adaptation.” Environmental Policy and Governance 19(6): 358–73.

CPEECC (Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges) 2013. Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges Report. https://www.edmonton.ca/city_government/documents/PDF/CitizensPanel-EnergyClimateChallenge.pdf.

Frank, Shannon. 2015. Telephone Interview with Lorelei Hanson, July 19.

Gastil, John. 2014. Democracy in Small Groups: Participation, Decision Making & Communication, 2nd ed. State College, PA: Efficacy Press.

Goleman, Daniel. 2006. Emotional Intelligence: Why It Matters More Than IQ. New York: Bantam.

———. 2013. Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence. New York: HarperCollins.

Gutmann, Amy, and Dennis Thompson. 2004. Why Deliberative Democracy? Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Habermas, Jürgen. 1996. Between Facts and Norms. Translated by William Rehg. Oxford: Polity Press.

Habermas, Jürgen, and William Outhwaite. 1996. The Habermas Reader. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Harwood Group (now Harwood Institute). 1993. “Meaningful Chaos: How People Form Relationships with Public Concerns.” Report Prepared for the Kettering Institute. https://www.dropbox.com/s/xb86hr906m5r8a2/Meaningful%20Chaos.pdf?dl=0.

Hobbs, Lindsay. 2013. “Participant Experiences of Change in a Deliberation Setting.” Alberta Climate Dialogue Working Paper. http://www.albertaclimatedialogue.ca/participant-experiences-of-change-in-a-deliberative-setting/participant-experiences-of-change-in-a-deliberative-setting/.

Kettering Foundation. 2011. “Naming and Framing Difficult Issues to Make Sound Decisions.” Kettering Foundation Report. https://www.kettering.org/sites/default/files/product-downloads/Naming_Framing_2011-.pdf.

Levin, Kelly, Benjamin Cashore, Steven Bernstein, and Graeme Auld. 2012. “Overcoming the Tragedy of Super Wicked Problems: Constraining Our Future Selves to Ameliorate Global Climate Change.” Policy Sciences 45(2): 123–52.

Lukensmeyer, Carolyn. 2012. Bringing Citizens’ Voices to the Table: A Guide for Public Managers. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

MacKinnon, Mary Pat, Jacquie Dale, and Deborah Schrader. 2014. “Looking under the Hood of Citizen Engagement: The Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges, ABCD.” Alberta Climate Dialogue Working Paper. albertaclimatedialogue.ca/cl4_looking-under-the-hood.

McCoy, Martha L., and Patrick L. Scully. 2002. “Deliberative Dialogue to Expand Civic Engagement: What Kind of Talk Does Democracy Need?” National Civic Review 91(2): 117–35.

Nabatchi, Tina, John Gastil, G. Michael Weiksner, and Matt Leighninger, eds. 2012. Democracy in Motion: Evaluating the Practice and Impact of Deliberative Civic Engagement. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nabatchi, Tina, and Matt Leighninger. 2015. Public Participation for 21st Century Democracy. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Owen, Harrison. 1997. Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler.

Pidgeon, Nick, Christina Demski, Catherine Butler, Karen Parkhill, and Alexa Spence. 2014. “Creating a National Citizen Engagement Process for Energy Policy.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 111(4): 13606–13. doi:10.1073/pnas.131751211.

Pike, Cara, Bob Doppelt and Meredith Herr, 2010. “Climate Communications and Behavior Change: A Guide for Practitioners” Climate Change Initiative, https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/handle/1794/10708.

Prikken, Ingrid, Simon Burall, and Michael Kattirtzi. 2011. “The Use of Public Engagement in Tackling Climate Change.” London: Involve. http://www.involve.org.uk//wp-content/uploads/2012/01/The-use-of-public-engagament-in-tackling-climate-change.pdf.

Rose, Jonathan. 2007. “The Ontario Citizens’ Assembly on Electoral Reform.” Canadian Parliamentary Review 30(3): 9–16.

Schwartz, Roger. 2002. The Skilled Facilitator: A Comprehensive Resources for Facilitators, Managers, Trainers and Coaches. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Smith, Mark K. 1997, 2004. “Carl Rogers and Informal Education.” Encyclopaedia of Informal Education. Last updated May 29, 2012. www.infed.org/thinkers/et-rogers.htm.

Synapcity. 2016. “About Civics Bootcamp.” http://synapcity.stiff.ca/workshop/civic-boot-camp/.

UN (United Nations). 1992. Rio Declaration on Environment and Development. http://www.unep.org/documents.multilingual/default.asp?documentid=78&articleid=1163.

——— 2015. Framework Convention on Climate Change. December 12. http://unfccc.int/documentation/documents/advanced_search/items/6911.php?priref=600008831.

Warren, Mark E., and Hillary Pearse, eds. 2007. Designing Deliberative Democracy: The British Columbia Citizens’ Assembly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Woodruff, Paul. 2005. First Democracy: The Challenge of an Ancient Idea. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Yankelovich, Daniel. 1991. Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World (Frank W. Abrams Lectures). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.