8. Climate Change, Social Change, and Systems Change

David Kahane

Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) came together because a group of leading researchers and practitioners of deliberative democracy wanted to make a difference in the realm of responses to climate change using the tools of public deliberation. I led the development of ABCD, was its Principal Investigator and Project Lead, and was involved in planning and researching each of its four deliberations. Our team believed that deliberation could make a difference in policy responses to climate change in Alberta, and we thought of public deliberation as a component of systemic change. Now is the time to ask and attempt to answer the questions of: What difference did we make, and what can we learn from our efforts at change? And what did we learn about the strengths and limitations of deliberative democracy in addressing a complex systemic problem like climate change?

In what follows, I unpack the character of wicked or super-wicked systemic problems, focusing on the example of climate change. I next describe eight stories of social change and impact—told within the deliberative democracy community—and use these to look at ABCD’s impact. I suggest that neither the field of deliberative democracy nor ABCD has been highly focused on whole systems and I explore why this might be the case. Finally, I examine how deliberative democracy can use insights from the fields of systems thinking, user-centred design, and systemic design to better address complex challenges like climate change.

Climate Change as a Complex Systemic Challenge

Deliberative democrats believe that engaging diverse citizens directly in problem solving and policy development can improve the responsiveness, accountability, and effectiveness of government, and build effective responses to our toughest challenges. Deliberative democratic exercises always take place in particular contexts and on limited scales, and yet often aspire to make a difference within large, complex systems. When representative groups of citizens are convened to help governments develop policy on climate change, for example, they work within a particular issue frame or set of frames, focus on a particular jurisdiction or set of jurisdictions, and seek action in particular places or around particular policies. Yet we know that climate change is a global challenge cutting across every jurisdiction, can be approached through a wide diversity of frames (see chapter 5), and touches just about every area of human activity and politics.

The dominant frame for climate responses in Canada treats climate responsibility as congruent with an advanced capitalist economy and with economic growth. The interventions required for progress, according to this perspective, have to do with skilful market transformation: using education, social marketing, subsidies, taxes, and regulations to shift market behaviours of individuals and firms so that we transition quickly to a prosperous low carbon economy. There also is recognition in at least some quarters of the public, civil society, and government of the need to increase community resilience in the face of climate impacts that will become more severe.

The challenges around climate change are serious even if you believe that mitigation and adaptation are possible through reforms to existing social, economic, and political structures. If you believe that climate change is a symptom of deeper pathologies in social, economic, and political systems that require deep transformation or revolution, as Klein does (2014), questions of boundaries and framing, and about influence and interaction across scales, sectors, and time, become thornier still. So one’s underlying theory of social change matters: How will your intervention interact with other forces to bring about the shifts you seek?

The difficulty of placing a particular public deliberation exercise within a persuasive story of social change is multiplied when we appreciate climate change as a wicked or super-wicked problem. With wicked problems, issues are defined differently by different stakeholders; understandings of the problem evolve; there is no right solution and no learning through trial and error; and the problem cuts across systems of governance as well as being viewed by many as a symptom of other problems (Rittel and Webber 1973). It has been suggested that climate change is in fact a super-wicked problem, with all of the features just cited and more: time is running out; those trying to solve the problem are also causing it; the solution arguably requires a central authority but central authorities are non-existent or weak; and populations as well as policy makers irrationally discount the future costs of current behaviours (Levin et al. 2012; see introduction).

Interventions around climate change are embedded in non-linear systems. Systems are often defined in contrast to more linear models that isolate particular elements of causation from the intricate temporalities and feedbacks that shape outcomes. A non-systemic deliberative democratic description of the work ABCD did with the City of Edmonton, for example, might start with a simple causal chain: citizens will deliberate, they will generate a report, the report goes to City Council, Council makes a decision, and this policy changes the state of affairs in the world. And still thinking linearly, one could start accounting for other forces and players, building a model that situates a deliberative intervention within a complicated set of dynamics.

Systems thinkers urge that we approach things in more ecological terms. Changes in ecosystems do not happen in straight lines but through negative feedback loops (where a perturbation feeds into systems that bring things back into balance, as when a healthy body deals with fluctuations in body temperature) and positive ones (where a stimulus causes changes that increase its power, as with global warming melting permafrost and releasing methane that increases warming). These feedback loops have different time lags, which—combined with how any given system nests within other systems—makes the change caused by any particular intervention intricately complex.

Where a linear understanding of the complications of linking citizen deliberation to political outcomes might be analogized to changing a setting within an intricate machine with many moving parts, a systems understanding might instead picture a novel event in a forest ecosystem, the impacts of which emerge through webs of complex interdependence. Such a system is more than the sum of its parts, and the behaviour of the various parts arises from the structure of the whole.

An implication of interdependence is that actions have effects other than those intended. Since everyone always sees and acts locally, there is no reason to expect that an aggregation of incremental improvements will improve the greater whole. Systemics exposes an assumption we have organised our societies around. This is the assumption that knowledge and action are both furthered when we divide them into smaller pieces over and over again.¹ (Ryan 2014, 3)

Systems theory plainly applies to climate change, one of the most complex systems problems humanity has ever faced (van der Lans 2014). In dominant climate change approaches, interventions tend to focus on altering parameters that may be superficial in terms of systems dynamics. For example, developing cleaner technologies for oil sands extraction may reduce emissions but not touch deeper dynamics of a capitalist, consumerist system premised on cheap sources of carbon-based energy. Indeed, perceived leverage points may even push in the wrong direction: cleaner oil sands technologies could perpetuate the illusion that oil sands can be a sustainable form of energy in the face of climate change (see Easterbrook 2011).

Deliberative Democracy and Theories of Change

What understandings of social change tend to be implicit in work that travels under the banner of deliberative democracy, and in conversations that take place in gatherings of practitioners and researchers in the field? To what extent are these understandings adequate to deep social complexity, wicked problems, and the systems dynamics sketched above?

Let me start with a personal observation based on my experience over the last decade at gatherings where researchers and practitioners of public deliberation assemble to learn new practices and reflect on the state of the field: gatherings like the Canadian Conference for Dialogue and Deliberation (C2D2), the National Coalition for Dialogue and Deliberation (NCDD), and the International Association for Public Participation (IAP2). At meetings like these and in the field more generally, I’ve encountered relatively little sustained, collective thinking about how deliberative democracy contributes to social change or transformation. In these contexts, practitioners tend rely on a particular kind of story about their work:

It tends to be a reformist story: citizen deliberation can be articulated with established decision-making structures to influence outcomes, while also changing experiences of citizenship and addressing social injustice (e.g., Bohman 1996; Gutmann and Thompson 1996; Lukensmeyer 2012).

It tends to be an aggregative story: the remedy to problems with liberal representative democracy is more and more deliberation involving more and more people in more and more places, thus building capacity, linkages, and infrastructures over time (e.g., Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015).

It tends to be a “liberal” story: it focuses on the positive effects that the careful exercise of deliberation can have on collective decision making and action (e.g., Gastil and Levine 2005). I would contrast this with a “radical” analysis that would focus on how social stasis and change are explained by the unintended, systemically mediated effects of individual actions—that is, by structures and mechanisms of power that underlie and constrain our individual and collective reasoning and decisions (e.g., Young 2005). This is a spectrum rather than a binary, and deliberative democrats tend to sit at the liberal end.

This dominant story is a positive one: gathering individuals to deliberate on common projects builds individual and community capacity, and can support or push organizations and governments to better meet human needs. While I share some of this optimism, it is worth considering the negative potentials of deliberation and the ways in which public engagement can: disempower participants and reduce their agency; reinforce exclusions and hierarchies; be manipulated; build capacities that are used for corrupt or negative ends; or be used to produce reports and recommendations that are never taken up or implemented (Gaventa and Barrett 2010; C. Lee 2015; Johnson 2015).

In what follows, I tease out eight stories of social change from deliberative literature, practices, and conversations. These change stories are not neatly bounded or separate; practitioners, organizations, and theorists combine them in diverse ways. All eight describe how citizen involvement can bring about social and political change.

The first story of social change involves legal empowerment. Deliberative bodies are authorized by governments to make binding decisions or decisions that will be voted on directly by the public. Prominent examples of this include participatory budgeting, as well as citizens’ assemblies on electoral reform in British Columbia (2004) and Ontario (2006).

The second story highlights a connection to government. Deliberative processes are formally linked to legislative processes so that outcomes shape decisions or increase responsiveness. Here, citizen voices and wisdom directly influence policy development, decision makers commit to taking recommendations seriously, and participants in deliberation often act as advocates for their recommendations (Lukensmeyer 2012; see Gaventa and Barrett 2010, 59, on the need for accompanying civil society mobilization).

The third story focuses on lobbying. Civil society organizations bolster their campaigns for changes to state behaviour by holding deliberative processes. Such approaches can blend citizen deliberation with multi-stakeholder processes to build influential coalitions of organizations outside government to push for state action.

A fourth story of how deliberative processes can have an impact focuses not on organizations but on individual citizens activated through public mobilization. Some deliberative strategies emphasize “critical mass”—getting many members of a community involved in dialogue and deliberation to build broad public pressure for government action. Other deliberative mobilization strategies emphasize building public confidence and constituencies for political change by communicating and legitimating the process and results of a deliberative exercise to publics not directly involved (Cutler et al. 2007).

The fifth story is about deliberative capacity. Experience with deliberative processes changes how governments, civil society organizations, grassroots communities, and deliberation practitioners engage with publics in the course of their work. A number of overlapping discourses and literatures fall under this heading:

• A broadly embraced discourse of capacity building as part of public involvement: practitioners from outside a convening organization or government support a deliberative process and at the same time seek to increase the organization’s ability to understand, plan, and deliver future engagement processes (Lukensmeyer 2012).
• A more specialized discourse and literature on institutionalizing or embedding deliberation in how government and other organizations operate, so that rather than engagement processes being ad hoc and one-off, they become part of standard processes of decision making, or legally mandated as a right to participate (e.g., Gaventa 2006).
• Scholarly literature on deliberative systems and, more recently, deliberative infrastructure: rather than evaluating particular deliberation processes in isolation, these approaches show connections between diverse spaces of deliberation, including legislative bodies, mini-publics, civil society, media, and online spaces. These approaches explore how a political system can achieve deliberative and democratic goods as an integrated whole (Fagotto and Fung 2009; Lukensmeyer 2012; Mansbridge et al. 2012; Nabatchi and Leighninger 2015).

The sixth story concerns community empowerment. Grassroots deliberative work increases the ability of communities to act on their own and solve their own problems. This can involve building abilities for collective action, fostering new forms of participation, and deepening networks and solidarities (Gaventa and Barrett 2010, 27–32).

The seventh story focuses on including the excluded. Running through many of the above stories is the goal of lifting up the voices and increasing the political influence of marginalized and oppressed groups (Williams 1998).

The eighth story is about changing participants. Deliberative democratic exercises increase civic and political knowledge, trust in government, sense of empowerment and agency, and propensity to participate in civic life (Fung 2003, 350).

ABCD’s Change Stories and Impacts

There are so many intervening variables in political processes that it is extremely difficult to reliably assess the impact of citizen deliberation exercises on policy and decision making (Delli Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs 2004; Mutz 2008; Ryfe 2005). Nevertheless, through its deliberation and research work, ABCD tried to assess some of those impacts. What follows is an overview of how ABCD’s work played out across the eight stories of deliberative impact described above.

The first story, legal empowerment, was never part of ABCD’s plans. Outside of participatory budgeting in municipal contexts, legal empowerment for deliberative exercises takes tremendous boldness on the part of political leaders and parties; this is rare in North America. I have never heard of legal empowerment of deliberative processes in connection with climate policy, and it likely would have been a non-starter in our context given the political sensitivity of the issue, the desire of political elites to maintain control of policy, and the dominance of expert discourses in decision making.

Connection to government was the core change story for much of ABCD’s work. We decided early on to focus on partnering with municipal governments in Alberta to convene citizens for stronger climate action. The partnership that emerged was with the City of Edmonton: a Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges (Edmonton Panel) was developed with the Office of the Environment at the city and the Centre for Public Involvement. The panel brought together fifty-six citizens for six days of deliberation; it yielded a set of recommendations submitted to City Administration and the Executive Committee of City Council, and that fed into an Energy Transition Strategy passed unanimously by City Council in 2015.

How did the Edmonton Panel influence city decisions? It’s hard to assess how much the deliberation process and its recommendations shaped the content of policy. First, the terms of the deliberation and the policy were importantly set by a detailed discussion paper (Pembina Institute and HB Lanarc 2012), such that citizens weren’t involved at a stage where they could influence the particular range of greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction mechanisms being considered by the city, or how climate change was framed. There was openness to citizens bringing their own frames and ideas into the deliberative conversation, but many parameters were already set. In the end, the Panel’s recommendations supported the City’s prior framing of energy transition as reflected in the discussion paper.

Second, the panel was asked to choose between three energy pathways for Edmonton—“business as usual,” “reduced carbon,” and “low carbon”—then to make recommendations on measures associated with their chosen pathway. The existing orientation of City Administration was toward the low carbon pathway, and citizen panelists affirmed this by a majority of 94 per cent. Moreover, while panelists offered caveats around particular city actions to achieve the low carbon pathway, by and large they supported the implementation measures advocated in the discussion paper. So here, as with framing, strong alignment between desired outcomes makes it hard to separate out the Edmonton Panel’s influence.

Third, there was a long period of policy development between the Edmonton Panel’s final report (March 2013) and the drafting of the Energy Transition Strategy (2014–15), with extensive further expert and stakeholder input and many shifts in framing and analysis of issues; this makes it hard to trace the influence of finer-grained panel recommendations. With that said, the Panel did have some of its specific recommendations reflected in the Energy Transition Strategy, especially around principles and values to guide city climate action, and advice on how to communicate with citizens (see Alberta Climate Dialogue and Centre for Public Involvement 2015).

What of the influence of the Edmonton Panel on political decision making? The evidence we have comes from interviews and public statements by civil servants and elected officials. One aspect of political decision concerned City Administration’s level of ambition in formulating the strategy and their willingness to bring it to Council. Speaking after passage of the Energy Transition Strategy, the city manager most closely connected with the development of the panel, and a lead author of the Energy Transition Strategy, remarked:

The work of the Citizens’ Panel was really critical to the overall success of Edmonton’s Community Energy Transition Strategy. Without it . . . there would have been a gaping hole. I don’t think you can bring an effort like this to a council without some level of assurance or support from citizens. . . . Without that type of work, that quality work, you’re just not ready to go to Council or else you should expect some big trouble. (Andrais 2015)

Upon passage of the Energy Transition Strategy, councillors and the mayor spoke about how the panel increased their willingness to support the strategy. In the mayor’s words, “I think the Citizen Panel gave confidence to council that a representative group of citizens armed with the right information would come to the same conclusion that our Administration’s recommending, which is that we should take action” (Iveson 2015). A city councillor said:

I think the panel’s influence was quite profound in the end because I think it did give everybody comfort that we were not out of line with what a group of citizens of this city coming together and deliberating were going to come to in terms of their understanding and their decision and their beliefs about how we should move forward as a city. . . . So, I think it was reassuring to know that what we suspected was there in terms of public support was actually there and to be able to test that. And to be able to know that if people really have a chance to look at this and weigh the options and understand that there’s trade-offs, that these are the answers that they came up with. (Henderson 2015)

The City had invested heavily in the panel, and it provided useful rhetoric in favour of a strategy both the mayor and Council supported, so these significant positive statements need to be interpreted in that context.

The third change story is that deliberation hosted by civil society organizations can support their lobbying. Following the success of the Edmonton deliberation, ABCD held a funding competition for project members who wished to develop other kinds of citizen involvement processes. One of the successful proposals was for a set of two-hour, province-wide virtual deliberations by telephone and online, intended to support the lobbying efforts of the Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance (AEEA), an environmental NGO. Jesse Row, AEEA’s lead, had a strategic intention in convening the deliberation: he hoped to gather evidence that the public, given the chance to deliberate, supported the AEEA’s advocacy for regulation of energy efficiency standards and greater provincial funding for energy efficiency programs; he also wanted information about the shape of public views (Row 2015). He later said that his ability to point to some particular voting numbers from a post-deliberation survey, alongside opinion polling AEEA did that was consistent with deliberation results, was a powerful argument in lobbying the Alberta government and others (2015). The piece of policy that the lobbying was meant to influence was never announced due to a change in government in 2015.

The fourth change story is one of public mobilization, which, as noted earlier, can be broken down into critical mass strategies that seek to involve a broad public, and strategies that rest on informing the public by communicating broadly about a deliberative process that involves relatively few participants. Critical mass approaches wove in and out of ABCD planning and discussions, including an unsuccessful proposal to the City of Edmonton for a citizens’ panel process that would have involved civil society groups in supporting the work of the Edmonton Panel, and proposed having panelists and these organizations work together to convene further community-based conversations. In another example, the 2012 Edmonton City-Wide Food and Urban Agriculture Citizen Panel successfully mobilized citizens. Fifty-eight citizens deliberated over a six-week period and made recommendations to City Council; their top recommendation opposed the development of urban farmland in the city’s northeast, alongside a host of other recommendations. The Food and Urban Agriculture panel drew public attention to these issues, and many participants in the panel participated in hearings before City Council and have remained active in the local food movement. In the end, City Council approved development of the northeast farmlands, to the great disappointment of civil society organizations, some panelists, and many involved citizens. Other panel recommendations to the city may have carried more weight, though here we run into the problem, noted above, of assessing impacts given many intervening variables.

What about building deliberative capacity, the fifth change story about impacts? The ABCD project team talked a lot about capacity building. We offered workshops that introduced civil servants, elected officials, and others to deliberative democratic methods. Moreover, in developing particular projects we sought to develop capacities in facilitators and note takers (see chapter 7) and hoped that the organizations we worked with would become more adept and more supportive of innovative citizen engagement. The impact of these efforts is hard to trace and most likely modest.

The sixth change story is one of community empowerment, which had only a faint echo in ABCD’s deliberation projects. While the first iteration of our proposal to the City of Edmonton did envision community projects, the number of citizens involved was always going to be small, and this version of the deliberation was, in any case, rejected. The Food and Urban Agriculture Citizen Panel and surrounding activities, in which ABCD was more lightly involved, did connect with many forms of community ferment and action.

When it comes to including the excluded, the seventh change story, we can start by noting that ABCD as a project team had rough gender balance but was mainly white and class privileged. We worked repeatedly to increase representation of marginalized and oppressed groups, especially Indigenous people, in ABCD and our planning processes, with limited success (see chapters 4 and 6). The reasons are manifold: the whiteness of academia as well as the citizen involvement profession; the real and perceived irrelevance of research projects like ABCD (and its deliberation processes) to the pressing concerns of marginalized and oppressed communities; and the limited skills and networks of many of our Alberta-based members when it came to connecting with non-white, non-privileged groups and representatives. We had more success including diverse participants in our deliberations: the Edmonton Panel was in many ways demographically representative of the city, and the Oldman Watershed deliberation included a number of Indigenous participants. It is less clear that including individuals from marginalized and oppressed groups in deliberative spaces meaningfully increases the political influence, or addresses the marginalization and oppression of the communities from which they come (Gaventa and Barrett 2010, 44–46; von Lieres and Kahane 2007).

Finally, what of the eighth story, changing participants? ABCD invested heavily in survey research to measure the impacts of the deliberations on citizens. For example, for the Edmonton Panel we gathered data at the time of recruitment, and before, several times during, and after the deliberation. Our findings were inconsistent; they seem to confirm the view that research “provides a good deal of indirect support for the democratic potential of deliberation but also suggests that this potential is highly context dependent and rife with opportunities for going awry. Research explicitly devoted to the political consequences of deliberation, though relatively sparse, leads to a similar conclusion” (Delli Carpini, Cook, and Jacobs 2004, 328; see also Mutz 2008). We did document shifts in opinion: for example, participants in the Edmonton Panel had a greater confidence in their ability to affect what government does at the end of deliberation than before it started²; there was a rise in self-reported measures of participant knowledge about climate change, around what climate change is, what energy vulnerability is, ways to reduce Edmonton’s GHG emissions, and more (see Hobbs 2013). Longitudinal evidence of change or the persistence of change was ambiguous in the survey data. While some panelists clearly were moved and influenced by their experience (this comes across, for example, in interviews with participants who remained strongly involved in the politics of municipal energy transition after the panel) (Hannah and MacLellan 2015), we can’t claim that there were widespread or significant changes across the fifty-six participants.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that all four of the deliberations in which ABCD was involved were “mini-publics”: spaces of deliberation designed by professionals into which a relatively small, deliberately recruited group of citizens are invited by conveners to learn about an issue, exchange perspectives, and make recommendations. As comes out in the discussion of this chapter, mini-publics have strengths but also weaknesses when it comes to understanding and supporting deep and systemic change. The fact that ABCD worked with this model speaks to the range of deliberation expertise in ABCD and how the project was able to draw on this under pressure, the needs and desires of the partners with whom we became involved, and a certain path-dependence that came out of early choices in framing ABCD’s work (see chapter 6).

Impact on Deliberative Democracy

I have focused on particular deliberation projects in looking at these eight change stories in ABCD. What of changes seeded by the project as a whole? The project had its inception at a large meeting of researchers and practitioners of deliberative democracy asking, “How do we advance the field?” What was ABCD’s role in advancing the field, especially as it relates to the challenge of climate change?

In addition to holding deliberations, we in ABCD did a great deal of research, convening, and outreach to advance the project and the field. We hosted many workshops for different audiences on deliberation and climate change; shared our project’s learning through social media, web platforms, and scholarly research; and built strong relationships within and beyond our team. These activities had ripples: relationships and networks were built among members of ABCD and with partners and others; thousands of conversations about public deliberation and climate change took place with civil servants, elected officials, participation professionals, NGO members, and fellow citizens; graduate students built their capacities through ABCD research assistantships; ABCD materials were taught in a number of university courses; there were numerous presentations to academics, practitioners, and civil servants; and team members produced dozens of publications, blog posts, and working papers. Our learning and expertise have fed into other deliberation and change projects like the Climate Justice Project’s Conversation on Climate Justice in British Columbia (M. Lee 2015) and the Energy Futures Lab (www.energyfutureslab.com) in Alberta. The project director and others continue to be drawn into government conversations about public involvement on climate change at the provincial and federal level.

The influence of all of this is hard to trace. Ultimately, to make claims about the difference ABCD made through activities like these, one has to reference some contestable account of how change happens, and what holds the status quo in place—which returns us to questions of systems thinking and systems change.

Why Aren’t Deliberative Democrats More Focused on Systems Change?

The Case of ABCD

As already discussed, our predominant story of social change in ABCD was supporting better climate responses by convening deliberations with governments to inform policy development. Yet, looking back on seven years of collaboration, this story of change raises crucial questions.

First, what conditions would need to be in place for our deliberative partnerships to shape policy in the most productive and progressive ways? For example, what other forces were in play in government, in political and democratic activities already going on in Alberta (Chilvers and Longhurst 2012), and in other parts of the system, that could enable or thwart the influence of our deliberations on policy processes?

Second, to what extent can success in influencing a particular policy moment like the passage of Edmonton’s Energy Transition Strategy be equated with more sustained action by government or other parties? The jury, it must be said, is still out on how much Edmonton’s Energy Transition Strategy will succeed in mitigating GHG emissions or spurring energy transition. The strategy, with its focus on market transformation, seeks to initiate and align action across government, markets, and civil society; while important work on this is clearly taking place on the part of City of Edmonton, it is too soon to pronounce on the degree of success it will have, and the key factors influencing this success.

And third, how might policy change and even sustained action by a municipal government along particular lines foster or obstruct wider or deeper changes needed to adequately confront climate change as a systemic issue? Does it push the right levers in the right direction? And what boundaries would we draw in characterizing the broader systems relevant to this question (e.g., political, cultural, economic, biophysical)?

In hindsight, ABCD did not do enough to understand whole systems, systemic change, or social change; we didn’t develop the foundations in our research or collaboration to offer robust answers to these three questions. There were some important moments of reflection on social change during the life of ABCD, including a session within an ABCD team workshop where John Gaventa introduced the Power Cube, a tool for analyzing forms, spaces, and levels of power within a system (Gaventa 2006). But we did not, in my view and with the benefit of hindsight, dig deeply enough into accounts of social change, or wrestle with how different stories alive in our group might fit together into a coherent whole. Why weren’t we more systemic in our reflection and work?

Pressures of time. One part of this had to do with time scarcity, given the urgency of developing deliberative partnerships, as well as pressures to do extensive research alongside the deliberations (given that our main funding was from a Canadian Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council grant). These pressures tended to fill our workshops and meetings, crowding out bigger picture thinking. Moreover, even if we had found ways to reflect on the big systems surrounding climate responses in Alberta as the project got under way, we also would have had to dig into systems relevant to each deliberation project.

Lack of ready-to-hand languages and tools. I have suggested, based on my own observations, that engagement in deliberative democracy communities of practice about social change is quite thin. So another challenge in ABCD was a lack of shared language, conceptual tools, and practical tools for mapping power, surfacing and articulating theories of social change, and thinking systemically. This was exacerbated by our annual workshops being co-designed and co-led by shifting teams of practitioners, working pro bono and often stretched for time.

Strength of underlying assumptions about deliberative democracy. In the deliberative democracy community there is a strong current of belief in the value of these processes, and an often fervent energy around seeding more of them as a route to positive social change. As discussed earlier, practitioners and researchers tend to tell stories about deliberative democracy’s impacts as being reformist, aggregative, liberal, and very positive (see also C. Lee 2015). Likewise, I suspect that conviction and energy around the value of deliberation on the part of many in ABCD helped keep us from digging deeply and insistently into our implicit accounts of social change and impact. For practitioners and academics alike, witnessing and participating in well-designed citizen deliberation processes build a warranted regard for the intelligence of citizen voices and the power of deliberation to uncover common ground and pathways to action. Yet, though warranted, this appreciation of specific experiences of deliberation and their perceived impacts can impinge on reflection about how deliberative exercises fit into whole systems, and the conditions under which they can support desired systems changes.

The Field of Deliberative Democracy

Some deliberative democracy researchers and practitioners do wrestle with questions around whole systems, systems change, and social change (Atlee 2012; Weymouth and Hartz-Karp 2015). The field as a whole, though, has not made systems a core question, including at field gatherings like those enumerated earlier.

One reason why practitioner gatherings tend not to focus in a sustained way on structural dynamics, system dynamics, or stories of transformational social change is that field-convening organizations want to keep their events—and the field as a whole—open and palatable to conservatives as well as progressives, and talking about social change or systems change or transformative change comes across as progressive (C. W. Lee 2015). A desire to welcome practitioners with diverse ideologies may diminish willingness to look at the widely divergent understandings of social change and dominant systems latent in the field; the temptation is simply to celebrate everyone’s good work.

There is also sometimes a perceived conflict between surfacing practitioners’ own political convictions or transformational ambitions in their work and a commitment to neutrality or objectivity in their professional roles as facilitators and process designers.³ In avoiding these issues, the deliberation field risks political inertness, insofar as there are logics and flows in systems that may thwart the impacts of deliberative processes, lead to perverse and unintended outcomes, and lead us to work within limited or unhelpful or unjust frames and boundaries. The articles collected in Lee, McQuarrie, and Walker (2015) outline some of these perversities in the context of public deliberation and economic inequality; earlier, I noted that other perversities can attend focusing engagement on local environmental questions without taking into account the broader systems of which issues being considered may be a mere symptom.

When there is a focus at professional gatherings on the impact and transformative ambitions of the field, attention tends to be on objects of easy agreement: the importance of healing relationships, changing the ways we talk to each other, getting better institutional supports, propagating more dialogue, and diminishing incivility. Yet this can neglect how even these may be symptoms of deeper systemic dynamics.

Learning across Fields

If deliberative democrats are to situate their stories of social change within understandings of whole systems, they can usefully reach for tools from other areas of endeavour and engage theorists and practitioners from other fields. I will briefly outline three such fields and explore the significance of their practices to projects like ABCD and to the deliberative democracy field in general.

Systems Thinking

Systems thinking is a vast area of inquiry and activity. Its proponents urge us to map systems methodically, with an emphasis on building artifacts that externalize mental models and provide common points of reference in dialogue. Such artifacts are used to diagram and model the dependencies, flows, feedback loops, and temporalities of systems. They include causal loop diagrams that map system behaviour by drawing nodes connected by balancing or reinforcing loops (Stroh 2015), and GIGA-maps that trace relationships across many layers and scales, challenging understandings of the boundaries of a problem and the relevant relationships (Systems Oriented Design 2015). Representing systems in diagrams, pictures, and physical models is taken to encourage holistic thinking, as compared to linear prose or purely verbal description and deliberation (Checkland 2000, S22).

A crucial question in depicting a system is deciding its proper boundaries: defining boundaries is contestable, and always linked to a particular purpose. Some systems approaches make a great deal of the need to critically engage with boundary choices, notice underlying sources of selectivity and options forgone, and invite deliberative and collaborative challenges to boundary claims (Ulrich 2005).

My analysis of ABCD, and of deliberative democracy as a more general field, pointed to the need to situate its accounts of the impact of public deliberation in terms of broader systems; the analytical processes just described and their theoretical underpinnings could, I believe, support this, not only in particular projects but in structuring engagement between researchers and practitioners at professional gatherings.

Human-Centred Design

Human-centred design is a second field of inquiry with theories and methods useful to coming to terms with the potential influence of deliberative public engagement on whole systems. Like deliberative democracy itself, human-centred design is a big tent; I will describe it through the work of one of its most prominent exponents, the design firm IDEO (www.ideo.com). Their methodology emphasizes:

Hearing. A team uses qualitative research methods to develop an empathetic understanding of the needs, desires, and aspirations of those for whom they are designing, using interviews and other ways of experiencing the worlds of diverse stakeholders. “At the early stages of the process, research is generative—used to inspire imagination and inform intuition about new opportunities and ideas. In later phases, these methods can be evaluative—used to learn quickly about people’s response to ideas and proposed solutions” (IDEO 2011, 32). Here, the goal is to develop a deep understanding of divergence and plurality.

Creating. The team synthesizes and interprets what it has heard and converges on a strategic direction, then again seeks divergence, brainstorming many potential responses to the challenge that has come into focus. The team prototypes some responses through participatory co-design, “building to think, acknowledging that the process of making ideas real and tangible helps us to refine and iterate the ideas very quickly” (IDEO 2011, 83). Prototypes can be models, storyboards, role-plays, or diagrams; they are meant to be quick, cheap, and disposable, designed to validate, communicate, and test ideas. Sharing prototypes within the team and with outsiders supports learning.

Delivering. Based on this learning the team converges on mini-pilots that are taken out into the world, still with low investment and with a readiness to learn through failure. Ongoing evaluation and measurement supports learning, and pilots are repeated until the team has feasible, sustainable interventions that respond to stakeholder needs.

Human-centred design emerged from fields like architecture, user interface design, and industrial design; more recently, it is associated with social innovation and an orientation to whole systems (Jones 2014). Applied within deliberative democracy projects and communities, it could more systematically bring new voices and perspectives into design and reflection; externalize understandings of systems to build understanding and alignment; and enable low-investment experiments to advance understandings of how to intervene successfully in systems.

Systemic Design

Systemic design combines the two approaches just described. The mindset, methodology, and methods of systemic design aim to address wicked problems: to enable “diverse teams to develop an elevated perspective of the challenge and translate novel insights into rapid action” while accelerating learning (Ryan 2014, 12). Ryan (2014, 6) describes the mindset of systemic design as “inquiring, open, integrative, collaborative, and centred.” The methodology or abstract logic of systemic design involves:

Inquiring. Moving beyond the knowledge held by the group by using stakeholder ethnography, literature reviews, engagement with experts, and learning journeys that take the group to parts of the system they may not have experienced before.

Framing. Bringing into view how issues and solutions are implicitly being framed or bounded, considering alternative frames, and developing a shared frame.

Formulating. Having the group articulate the diverse values that are motivating their work on an issue, and creating tangible artifacts (diagrams, extensive maps, physical models) that support a common understanding of values, frames, and understandings of the system.

Generating. Taking these artifacts out into the world to see how others respond, and perhaps as actual prototypes of interventions in the system. These artifacts should be quickly and cheaply produced, so that multiple understandings and interventions can be tested and build learning, including through failure.

Facilitating. Establishing and supporting norms for working together, and planning and creating settings and dialogues where the group can invite others into the work.

Reflecting. Assessing the effects of the group’s actions in the world, and moving from diverse observations about these to shared understandings that support further cycles of analysis and action.

The methods of systemic design draw from both systems thinking and design thinking: they include creating rich pictures of systems, mapping systems, and diagramming causal loops, and practices of prototyping that enable interventions in systems to be created quickly and roughly and tested on the ground (Ryan 2014).

How Might these Three Fields Inform and Complement Theories and Practices of Deliberative Democracy?

In thinking about the evolution of ABCD as a project, several elements of systems theory, human-centred design, and systemic design stand out as potentially helpful. First is the primacy in these approaches of systemic understanding as a foundation for effective action. In its early stages, ABCD used deliberative methods, both within our emerging team and with larger groups of stakeholders, to consider how citizen involvement could advance climate responses in Alberta. However, we did not methodically map broader systems relevant to our work—for example, the political, social, cultural, and economic systems that produced provincial and municipal climate policy in Alberta, with their complex dynamics, feedback loops, and webs of interconnection. And we did not engage in methodical “boundary critique” in our assessment of potential interventions. Views of these issues were always in play but often implicitly, inchoately, and without alignment of understanding or purpose across the ABCD team.

The conceptualization of complex, interdependent systems offered earlier in this chapter and the methods of system mapping just outlined could have been an important foundation for our collective work. This work could have been done iteratively in the cross-sectoral workshops that developed ABCD as a project, the team meetings of ABCD, and in meetings of smaller subgroups and teams. Incorporating systems analysis into the development of ABCD would have helped us to understand the potential impact of mini-publics on the climate policy system in Alberta; might have led us to articulate mini-publics differently with social movements and political opportunities (Kahane and MacKinnon 2015, 18–20; Kenrick 2013); or might have steered us to strategies for systemic influence other than mini-publics. Systems analysis would have mapped the forces, players, causalities, feedback loops, and temporalities within which we were intervening; it would have helped us to align around a shared, comprehensive analysis, and to critically assess the strategies we should pursue.

A second element of these three fields that stands out as helpful is how they deliberately move back and forth between divergence and convergence. Deliberative democratic methods are sophisticated in assembling diverse groups, surfacing values, weighing trade-offs, and using group processes to converge on common ground. In systems thinking, human-centred design, and systemic design, however, the movement between divergence and convergence is more crisply captured in methodology, and there are multiple stages of divergence-convergence; this methodology would have been useful to us in developing ABCD, and in discouraging what feel in retrospect like moments of premature closure.

Third, the systemic methods discussed offer a suite of ethnographic approaches to understanding diversity within systems. In addition to bringing diverse groups into deliberations (which is what ABCD mainly did), human-centred design and systemic design emphasize interviewing, learning journeys, and other methods of hearing and inquiring. ABCD, which was a very white and in other ways relatively homogeneous team, would have benefited by adding some of these approaches to our work (see chapter 2 for the importance of social diversity to climate deliberation).

Fourth, I believe that ABCD would have benefited from creating artifacts and prototyping. As brought out in chapter 6 of this volume, ABCD struggled both within its membership and in partnership development to communicate the distinctiveness of deliberation as a mode of public engagement; “building to think” would have been powerful in both articulating our methods to ourselves and communicating them to others. It not only would have clarified and aligned our thinking within ABCD but would have given us pictures, diagrams, and other artifacts to communicate our thinking to others, and to support others in situating themselves in relation to our approach. One tool we did use repeatedly in ABCD to create artifacts of our thinking was graphic recording—depicting conversations on large sheets of paper during deliberative events (see chapter 1): for all of the virtues of graphic recording, though, this method is importantly different from those offered by design approaches. With graphic recording, artifacts are created by a professional rather than participants; there is one artifact rather than many for a given segment of work; and the artifacts are professional-looking and permanent rather than “quick-and-dirty” and easily revised by participants (for an extended discussion of graphic recording see C. Lee 2015, 123–49).

And fifth, the deliberation projects that ABCD brought into the world tended to be high stakes: our three citizens’ panels took months or years to develop, involved intense labour by teams, and were expensive. This stands in contrast to an emphasis on low-stakes, quick, iterative learning by doing. It’s not that this “mini-pilot” approach could transfer straightforwardly to all of the contexts in which ABCD worked—it might not, for example, have fit the needs of the City of Edmonton that gave rise to that Edmonton Panel. But it is interesting to think about points in ABCD’s formation as a project when diverse, low-stakes deliberative interventions might have supported us in clarifying our thinking, learning about systems, and converging on strategy. We could have designed small, rough-around-the-edges deliberations with clear learning purposes in relation to our bigger project, and folded this learning back into our methodologies and our development of partnerships.

None of these insights from other fields is a silver bullet; rather, they hint at new possibilities in deliberative democratic practice. And it is important to recognize obstacles to their use. When I canvassed reasons why ABCD did not delve deeply and persistently into questions of social and systems change, I mentioned the lack of ready-to-hand language and tools: these other fields have value to offer here in the methodologies and methods I’ve outlined. I also mentioned the strength of underlying assumptions about deliberative democracy on the part of some members of ABCD; these other approaches to systems change might usefully have helped us to articulate these assumptions, assess them critically, and bring them into explicit relationships to the particular systems in Alberta that we were seeking to affect. The third reason I cited, though, had to do with scarce time on the part of a mainly volunteer ABCD team, pressures associated with the exigencies of particular projects, and constraints that arose from complexities of partnerships and policy processes. My enthusiasm about bringing deliberative democracy together with systems theory, human-centred design, and systemic design is tempered by an awareness of the crush of such circumstances in projects like ours.

Stepping back from the particularities of ABCD, I believe that the mindsets, methodologies, and methods of systems theory, human-centred design, and systemic design can contribute importantly to deliberative democracy as a field. These problem-solving approaches offer a range of tools that could be used in citizen deliberations, as well as in processes of project development: in both contexts, they would support more careful embeddedness of processes in systems, and more careful analysis of potential impacts, than current deliberative democracy approaches typically achieve. These problem-solving approaches also would be useful in building field learning, since these mindsets, methodologies, and methods might support deliberative democracy researchers and practitioners in thinking concertedly about questions of impact, social change, and systems change.

What conditions would be needed for these new kinds of reflection to enter deliberative democratic theories and practices? In some ways, the conditions exist: the tools could be brought into sessions at professional gatherings, including by invited practitioners of systems approaches; they could structure workshops focused on field learning; and if ready-to-hand tools were developed, they might be taken up in particular projects. Three dynamics that may cut against deliberative democrats picking up these tools are the time and resource pressures of the work, challenges to assumptions about the virtue and effectiveness of the work that some might find uncomfortable, and the professionalization of the field, which may incline practitioners to tout the effectiveness of their tools rather than engaging critically about whether the tools are in fact effective in shifting systems (Kahane and Loptson 2017).

How Might Deliberative Democracy Inform and Complement Systems Theory, Human-Centred Design, and Systemic Design?

The cross-fertilization of deliberative democracy with systems theory, human-centred design, and systemic design has potential in the other direction as well. I have been struck, in my forays into these fields, by the limited exploration of questions of democratic involvement and accountability. To the extent that these approaches engage with democratic publics and citizens, it tends to be in the language of clients, customers, or stakeholders. These terms resonate uncomfortably with neoliberal understandings of citizens as “users and choosers” rather than “makers and shapers” of social and political policy (Cornwall and Gaventa 2001). Insofar as there is an elitist tinge to the three approaches to systems change that I’ve outlined—a deep ethnographic sensibility, but on the part of a privileged cohort of ethnographers—deliberative democracy can offer both analysis grounded in viewing citizens as key agents in policy development and political change, and practical tools for rooting these approaches more firmly in the will and activity of democratic publics.

Furthermore, deliberative democrats have thought and practised intensively around the pragmatic as well as principled connections between work with citizens and influence on governments. While I suggested above that the eight deliberative democratic change stories should be nuanced through a systems lens, it’s also true that systems theory, human-centred design, and systemic design might benefit from wisdom embedded in these eight stories when it comes to securing influence for social change processes.

Finally, the strongly normative tendencies of deliberative democratic theory may be a useful counterpoint to the scientific and commercial roots of systems theory and user-centred design, reminding us of the ethical implications of particular methods and offering a rich conceptual and analytical language for thinking about ethics in the context of democratic intervention in complex systems.

Conclusion

ABCD partnered with organizations in the province to convene citizens: our goal was to enhance climate responses through public participation and to advance learning about deliberative democracy and climate change. I have suggested that ABCD, for all its strengths, would have benefited from organizing its work more methodically and consistently 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. This in itself has been a key part of our learning.

Climate change is not only a wicked or super-wicked problem, it is a systemic one. The more deliberative democracy can foreground questions of systems change in mindsets, methodologies, and methods, the more helpful it can be in building effective political, social, and cultural responses to climate change and other systemic questions. A systemic deliberative democracy would support citizens in coming to grips with the wicked and socially complex character of climate change, so that they could shape wise and effective responses to the challenges. Such an approach would support governments and other bodies seeking to convene citizens around climate change in themselves coming to see the challenge through a systems lens.

As deliberative democrats become more adept at working with systemic mindsets, methodologies, and methods they will position themselves to infuse a greater citizen voice in quarters where a systems perspective is already present but where greater democratic engagement is needed. A systemic deliberative democracy would support efforts not just to interpret the whole system, but to change it.

Notes

1. Alex Ryan uses “systemics” to describe an ensemble of the fields of systems thinking, human-centred design, and systemic design.

2. Evidence of the Edmonton panelists’ greater confidence could be found in the participant’s response to the survey question: “How much can people like you affect what the government does?” Participants were given a five-point scale on which to place their answer where 1 was “not at all,” 2 was “a little,” 3 was “a modest amount,” 4 was “a lot,” and 5 was “a great deal.” The average answer in the pretest was 2.89 whereas the average taken after session 6 was 3.38 (Boulianne and Loptson 2013).

3. The question of practitioner neutrality and political commitment was taken up (with difficulty but also success) in the 1980s and 1990s in the field of dispute resolution; I believe that there are lessons for deliberative democrats in that experience. See Bailey 1991; Bryan 1992; Lederach 1995; and Merry 1987.

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