6. Collaborating on Deliberative Democracy

David Kahane and Lorelei L. Hanson

Major deliberation projects—whether mini-publics or more complex initiatives—typically involve collaboration between deliberation professionals or organizations and some combination of academics, representatives of governments, NGOs, businesses, and others. Alberta Climate Dialogue was an unusually sustained research collaboration around deliberative democracy, and involved several further collaborations around deliberation projects. In this chapter, we unpack our learning about how to structure collaboration to support decision making and collective learning in complex deliberation projects.

Collaboration is “a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more parties to achieve common goals by sharing responsibility, authority and accountability for achieving results” (Chrislip 2002). When disparately positioned people collaborate, they share knowledge and learn collectively; engaging in cooperation and coordination, they create a mutual vision and joint strategies (Chrislip 2002).

Every context and community differs: no one model of collaboration works in all situations, yet many collaborative scholars agree on several fundamental elements required to address tough social problems. First, collaboration should include a range of stakeholders representing diverse interests, organizations, or perspectives on the issue of concern (Cestero 1999; Chrislip 2002; Mattessich and Monsey 1992): “If competing values and differing positions mark public problems, the work of defining problems and solutions must be done by the people who hold these values and positions” (Chrislip 2002, 45). Second, the group must identify attainable goals and objectives that all participants can agree are worthwhile (Mattessich and Monsey 1992; Williams and Ellefson 1996). Third, collaborative process should be well-designed, so that as the group works toward consensus there is a focus on negotiation and reflection (Keen and Mahanty 2006). Skilled facilitation helps stakeholders work together constructively, and content experts contribute appropriate knowledge and experience (Chrislip 2002; Williams and Ellefson 1996). Fourth, sustained commitment to the process, and shared power within it, enable a sense of shared responsibility to solve problems (Chrislip 2002; Weber 2000). Finally, where collaboration involves government, the collaborative process should be endorsed by key officials (Lampe and Kaplan 1999).

Collaboration that integrates these five fundamental elements supports the development of strategies needed to address wicked issues, which have no clear right answers, involve interconnected systems, and require adaptive responses (see the introduction). Collaboration that supports citizen engagement and deliberation can increase society’s capacity to address wicked issues like climate change. Public deliberation can identify common purposes and develop collaborative relationships among citizens, public officials, and stakeholders; it increases players’ abilities to respect and listen to one another’s opinions, so that competing perspectives are aired and considered before decisions are made (Schusler, Decker and Pfeffer 2003). It also directs citizens and leaders to make value judgments and trade-offs among competing problem definitions and solutions.

Most public deliberation projects are complex collaborations, involving champions who initiate a project, funders, participation professionals, civic organizations, and often government officials and academics. Such collaborations can marshal resources and capacity for projects, increase the legitimacy of processes relative to those convened by a single player, and enhance the quality of deliberations by bringing multiple perspectives and networks to bear on design. Yet this diversity of collaborators also means working through variable understandings of the objectives of a deliberation, what constitutes effective social change, how best to approach difficult issues, and the risks involved. Collaborators bring divergent knowledge, best practices, ways of navigating political bureaucracies, and public communication styles. Conflicting power dynamics and different norms can produce tensions among actors, and individual actors may experience conflicting allegiances and identifications (Newman et al. 2004).

Each of the four deliberations that Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) convened or participated in involved its own complex collaborations and context, and was enabled or constrained in distinctive ways, including the degree to which each used deliberation to engage citizens on climate change. ABCD partners included the Centre for Public Involvement (a research and practice organization co-funded by the University of Alberta and the City of Edmonton), a municipal government (the City of Edmonton), a non-government organization (the Alberta Energy Efficiency Alliance) and a para-governmental organization (the Oldman Watershed Council). The authors were engaged in these collaborations in different ways. David Kahane was the Project Director of ABCD, and intimately involved in the collaboration and resulting deliberation with the City of Edmonton, whereas Lorelei Hanson acted as a researcher on three of the projects. Our analysis of the collaborations between ABCD and these partners builds on our own recollections of group conversations and debriefs in meetings over the life of the project, semi-structured, taped interviews conducted with the partners and members of ABCD, and observational notes taken during the deliberations. Some of the interviews were conducted during the development of, or closely following, a deliberation and others were undertaken several years after the projects were complete.

Using the key collaborative elements described above as frames of analysis, we provide a short case study of each deliberation to explore the challenges, tensions, strengths, and opportunities encountered during the collaborations central to each of these projects. In looking at each case we trace:

• initial relationships and relations of trust that gave rise to the collaboration and how these influenced the development of goals and objectives of the deliberation;
• reasons for collaborating, including the amount of emphasis the outside partner placed on the outcome of the deliberation, and the associated perceived risks;
• the trajectory of development of the collaboration, particularly how conflicts about the design of the deliberation process or research manifested and were managed, and the role of outside decision makers in the process;
• the duration of the project, the time invested by collaborators, the burdens of contribution, and how these factors impacted trust and shared responsibility; and
• the forms of learning that emerged from the project among the convenors and citizen deliberators.

We will start, however, with an overview of ABCD as a collaboration.

Collaboration and Alberta Climate Dialogue

Alberta Climate Dialogue (ABCD) was a learning project, aiming to advance both the field of deliberative democracy and the quality of climate change responses through research on climate deliberations convened with organizations in Alberta. Over the seven years ABCD was active, it connected with dozens of people and organizations, some new to deliberative democracy and others expert in the field. Many members of ABCD took on their roles in addition to their job responsibilities. Academics in the project came from an institutional culture that emphasizes academic research for publication and does little to recognize or reward community-engaged scholarship, much less collaboration for political action. At the same time, many academics were concerned about climate change, and saw their involvement in ABCD as a political commitment. Deliberation professionals in the project also placed a strong emphasis on their own learning and on advancing the field, often regarding this learning as requiring different methodologies and forms of dissemination than those favoured by academics.

The practitioners most involved in the project contributed a lot of time pro bono, though several also received remuneration for consulting on particular deliberation projects. Participants in the project from NGOs and businesses were more interested in influence and action than in research; most remained detached from aspects of the project focused on learning, and some dropped out of the project because they saw its learning focus as not fitting with their motivation for involvement. A group of about ten researchers and deliberation professionals played a pivotal role in ABCD, working on the project in its early stages, serving on its steering committee, co-designing major workshops, leading research activities, and maintaining and sharing an understanding of the value of public deliberation in addressing tough political problems.

The federal research grant ABCD received provided much-needed funds and other institutional support, and placed expectations on ABCD to produce robust research and scholarship within its five-year mandate based on actual deliberations held with partners. This created a lot of pressure. For the first eighteen months or so of the project we were not sure that we would find partners for deliberations; ABCD thus became willing to conform to the needs of deliberation partners even when partners pushed against some of our judgments and principles around best process design, social learning, the link between deliberation and decision making, or the public profile of deliberations. ABCD’s international team of engagement researchers and practitioners were leaders in theories and practices of innovative citizen involvement, yet we were selling approaches that governments and other organizations in Alberta were not actively seeking.

Case Study 1: The City of Edmonton’s Food and Urban Agriculture Strategy

ABCD’s first collaboration was not focused on conducting a deliberation but on partnering around the research component of a deliberation process already under way. In 2012, CPI was conducting a City-Wide Food and Urban Agriculture Citizen Panel with the City of Edmonton as part of developing a food and urban agriculture strategy. There were loose connections between members of ABCD and CPI, and two ABCD researchers were active in urban food politics and familiar with the political process under way; this led to ABCD members collaborating around research dimensions of the project.

The purpose of the citizen deliberation was to “develop recommendations that would be given to the City of Edmonton that would directly be included and inform the development of their urban food strategy” (Cavanagh 2015); the deliberation linked to climate change only indirectly. But ABCD was eager to begin research in the absence of its own deliberation projects, and CPI, an organization co-funded by the City of Edmonton and the University of Alberta to do research to support innovative public involvement, wanted more hands in developing a research strategy and more tools to bring to the deliberation project. ABCD members were interested in the research as the basis for comparative case studies, while CPI’s realization of its mandate depended on producing strong research in the context of a deliberation project that was being developed on a timeline of only a few months in a “highly politicized context” (Cavanagh 2015).

When ABCD was first introduced to the food and urban agriculture deliberation, CPI already had a survey-based research strategy mapped out, which allowed little time to revisit major components of their project. CPI, a small organization, had only one full-time researcher devoted to collecting data for the project. Four ABCD researchers became involved in the research: two helped CPI design its citizen surveys and two undertook observation of the deliberations, conducted semi-structured interviews with six of the citizen deliberators, and consulted with CPI’s researcher on the citizen survey results. However, there was friction between members of the ABCD research team—who were interested in exploring alternative approaches to this public deliberation, introducing more discussion of climate change into the framing, and examining both the challenges and strengths of the deliberation—and CPI researchers, who welcomed help on their existing track of research and implementing a specific approach to the deliberation. It should be noted that the players involved here were mostly academics: while much of this chapter examines challenges that arise in collaborations across boundaries of sectors and professions and organizations, here we see friction that can arise among those working in universities. This friction was not explicitly dealt with among the academics in this case; rather, tensions played out around the limited influence ABCD researchers were able to have on research methodology, and their restricted access to the research data.

The collaboration between ABCD and CPI on the City-Wide Food and Urban Agriculture Citizen Panel was thus very limited. The deliberation process appeared to ABCD’s researchers to be robust and well facilitated. Shared learning was constrained by the lack of both trust and shared responsibility between ABCD and CPI, and the politically sensitive context for the deliberation. As a result, there were limited opportunities for ABCD to use CPI’s experiences to inform their deliberative processes, and for CPI to consider the feedback and analysis provided by ABCD researchers on the Citizens’ Panel.

Case Study 2: The City of Edmonton’s Citizens’ Panel on Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges

ABCD’s second collaboration was with the City of Edmonton’s Office of the Environment, and followed a long process of conversation and relationship building. ABCD was introduced to the Office of the Environment through Lorelei Hanson, who had known many of these civil servants for nearly a decade through her citizen-at-large position on the Office of the Environment’s Environmental Advisory Committee. The Office of the Environment had extensive experience developing and shepherding controversial policies through city bureaucracies, and in building public support and managing public concerns about environmental policies and strategies. They had consulted extensively with many stakeholders in shaping and framing their latest environmental strategic plan, The Way We Green (TWWG), and indeed, climate-oriented elements of TWWG arose out of a stakeholder consultation. But these civil servants struggled to build civic and institutional support for TWWG, particularly its ambitious climate change and energy objectives.

Divergent interests brought each partner to the table. The Office of the Environment’s reasons for partnering were highly pragmatic: they hoped that strong citizen engagement would produce information that would help them align energy and climate policy, already fairly advanced in development, with the perspectives of citizens, and to show this alignment in order to secure political support for an energy transition strategy. While ABCD’s mandate emphasized research, learning, and capacity building on deliberation, these were not prominent among the expressed priorities of the Office of the Environment, though it was amenable to ABCD pursuing these goals within the collaboration. ABCD’s project director also connected with a councillor who held the environment portfolio for the city, and who was passionate about climate change; he was seeking ways for the city to address this pressing and difficult issue, and at key junctures encouraged the Office of the Environment to pursue a partnership with ABCD.

Perceived risks also distinguished the two partners. The Office of the Environment had a great deal riding on the outcome of the deliberation they designed with ABCD: the deliberation was only one part of a climate and energy plan that was a years-long piece of work, and if the citizen engagement component compromised the plan’s development it would be a major setback for the unit and a blow to the civil servants who had invested massive amounts of time in its development. Consequently, there were strong incentives for managers from the Office of the Environment to be closely involved in developing the project in order to maximize the benefit and minimize the risk to the bigger plan. Six members of the Office of the Environment were initially involved in the Edmonton Panel project, though the time burdens of the collaboration were intense and one manager from the city’s side eventually took the lead, with others coming in to advise on particular aspects like budget and publicity. For ABCD, this project was the first deliberation it was designing and fully managing; there were many months of uncertainty about whether the project would go forward, and ABCD’s leadership and members made tremendous efforts to sustain its progress. Three practitioners and two researchers were intensively involved in the development of the project, and many others advised, developed, conducted research, and participated in a range of workshops that ABCD conducted to support the design of the project.

Because of the heavy investment of both parties in having a successful deliberation, and the different risks and desired outcomes each brought to the relationship, there were many points of struggle and negotiation throughout the collaboration. There was a sustained struggle to align each group’s understanding of what citizen deliberation meant and how it differed from consultation approaches more familiar to city managers. ABCD researchers and practitioners did their best to communicate the rationale and principles underlying citizen deliberation, how it could be conducted in a bias-balanced way, and how it could fit productively with the city’s decision-making structure; they did this in the course of negotiations about a deliberation process and through workshops organized to educate and engage city staff. Yet prior to the start of the deliberation an Office of the Environment staff member still expressed puzzlement about the approach:

Some of the tools . . . I’m not comfortable with, but again I’m open . . . I know that they will resonate with some people, but I’m just wondering if that makes [the citizens] informed or that makes them influenced. (KI 1-4)¹

Another civil servant remarked late in the partnership:

Yeah, sometimes you know . . . and even when we thought we were on the same page, we weren’t on the same page because the language we were using . . . you know . . . we’d understand it differently. (KI 2-3)

Some design elements for the Edmonton Panel proposed by ABCD felt inappropriate or too risky to city staff. For example, proposals to have diverse stakeholders address panelists directly or to have a councillor deliberate alongside panelists were felt by one Office of the Environment staff member to compromise the objectivity and representativeness of the exercise (KI 1-10). Tensions also arose from understandings, or misunderstandings, of ABCD as a research-oriented project. Office of the Environment staff at times seemed to perceive deliberative democracy as an obscure, scholarly concept, and ABCD as principally interested in generating research and lacking a sufficient grasp of the difficult political negotiations typically faced by their department. In the words of one civil servant:

ABCD, I mean we’re kind of funding part of their education. I’m sure they’re looking forward to publishing and whatever else, but my eye is on the prize that I have to live with after they’re gone, [which] is a quality outcome. It seems a little bit like a second priority, like the academic pursuit and brilliance and, you know, academics is number one, and oh yeah, you have this deliverable which sounds very businessy. But we’ve got to take this to Council after and it’s actually got to have value. (KI 1-10)

It took a year and a half of negotiation and planning with ABCD for the Office of the Environment to feel confident enough to move forward with the Edmonton Panel. Key design issues that had to be negotiated included: gathering a demographically representative and attitudinally diverse group of citizens; supporting citizens’ learning about climate change and policy choices facing the municipality; facilitating deliberation and voting on recommendations; and producing a citizen report for the city. While city staff trusted ABCD practitioner members’ facilitation expertise, they were unwilling to delegate design of the citizen deliberation to these experts; rather, particular decisions were hashed out, and often revisited numerous times. This level of co-design differs from other approaches to deliberation planning, such as the AmericaSpeaks model, which preserved an arms-length relationship with funders and those to whom citizens made recommendations, securing more autonomy than ABCD had in project design and delivery (Lukensmeyer 2014). ABCD needed to be responsive to the needs of city partners, but this meant that ABCD’s team had less clear authority to determine certain aspects of the work. For example, a disagreement arose with the Office of the Environment regarding the presence of media at the deliberation, which would have included a press launch event, press access to the Edmonton Panel, and public sharing of session reports.

While there was initial agreement about some limited publicity for the event, a few months before the deliberation Office of the Environment staff argued against involving media, suggesting, among other things, that it would undermine the objectivity of the citizen deliberation. City staff also worried that media attention in advance of the panel’s formal recommendations to City Council would lead some councillors to feel pressured by the administration. This was an unwelcome change of position from ABCD’s point of view: based on the experience of practitioners, and knowledge of other deliberative exercises (Parkinson 2006; Cutler et. al. 2008), ABCD saw strong connections between public awareness of citizen processes, the public legitimacy of these exercises, and a sense of accountability on the part of elected officials to attend seriously to recommendations. However, the Office of the Environment was inclined to assign the deliberation process a more limited role in policy or project development than ABCD desired. ABCD members felt they were offering a promising alternative pathway to building public support for the energy and climate change plan, and were frustrated by what they viewed as the Office of the Environment’s attachment to more familiar and manageable practices of public engagement.

Notwithstanding the struggle involved in aligning ABCD and Office of the Environment objectives, working together over months built trust and understanding that resulted in a successful citizen deliberation and sustained commitments over several years from members of ABCD and the Edmonton Panel, who acted as champions for the energy and climate change plan that the Office of the Environment was taking to City Council. Members of ABCD, who at times were impatient with the caution demonstrated by their city partners, observed Office of the Environment staff doggedly working to make environmental policy changes in difficult circumstances, and consequently developed empathy for them and admiration for their efforts. Office of the Environment staff saw ABCD members doing effective work during the deliberation, and came to appreciate the voice they were given in decision making about deliberation, as seen in these remarks by two members of the Office of the Environment:

I was happy with that opportunity to be listened to . . . to be sort of tolerant of the fact that we weren’t experts in this field and that we were maybe asking dumb questions and perhaps being a little bit anxious at times when maybe there wasn’t a need to be in retrospect, but again I think [ABCD] were patient with us. I think you know they listened to us and they gave us an opportunity to influence the process so I think it worked well. (KI 2-4).

This was a complex project, and I can’t imagine it being done in a better way. I think if it was a cookie cutter, we’ve done this 50 times, and hired a consulting firm, but that’s not what this was about. And so I think it was about learning together and I think we weren’t always the easiest client to have and in those times David was tolerant, and at times where we needed to be pushed because we were worried about the timing of things, there were times where he read us the riot act and that was a good thing to do. . . . It was a great outcome. We invented our way together. . . . And it became a good team effort as we got to know each other. (KI 2-8)

Especially as the deliberation approached and in the eight weeks over which it was carried out, there was a sense of being in it together, and also a willingness to give and take. As one Office of the Environment staff member recollected after the deliberation, “I think what really worked well is a willingness . . . for everybody wanted the panel to succeed, whatever the outcome of the panel was . . . . I mean everybody was passionate about that and willing to work toward that . . . I mean work through the challenges” (KI 2-3). Moreover, as the deliberation progressed, the views of citizens ended up supporting the approach favoured by the Office of the Environment, and the deliberation process as a whole became celebrated by members of ABCD, city staff, and elected officials.

Case Study 3: A Virtual Deliberation on Energy Efficiency Choices

The AEEA, a network of industry and NGOs working to advance energy efficiency in Alberta, was interested in collaborating with ABCD. AEEA’s executive director had been involved in ABCD’s work since its inception as a representative of the Pembina Institute, a Canadian environmental NGO. When ABCD launched a funding competition in 2012 for deliberation projects led by members of the broad network, AEEA’s executive director joined with one of ABCD’s deliberation practitioners to propose an online and telephone-based citizen deliberation on Energy Efficiency Choices. The objective was to use the deliberation as a citizen education tool and to support AEEA’s lobbying efforts with the Alberta government by demonstrating citizen support for provincial energy efficiency incentives and funding (see chapter 7). Even though climate change was not a dominant frame, members of ABCD were interested in the project, as it would provide a comparative case study for the Edmonton Panel, and also extend ABCD’s experience with designing and facilitating different citizen deliberation formats.

While AEEA worked with one of ABCD’s deliberation practitioners to design and carry out the deliberation, there was limited collaboration between the AEEA and ABCD teams. There was a research component in the online deliberation proposal, but this was not a major part of AEEA’s desired outcomes. ABCD researchers participated in several initial planning calls, and their questions and suggestions were met with ambivalence and concern from AEEA’s executive director. Given the limited funding AEEA had secured from ABCD to finance the deliberation, he was concerned that the time investment required to align research with the deliberation would overburden AEEA; as a contractor, the executive director said he could not afford to devote hundreds of unpaid hours to a research project without clear results that would enable both him and his organization to achieve their objectives. As well, he was concerned that research questions being proposed by ABCD might compromise AEEA’s use of the deliberation outcomes to demonstrate to government that Albertans supported increased funding for energy efficiency and incentive programs. Perceiving the research as introducing an element of risk, the AEEA executive director gave limited weight to feedback he received from ABCD’s researchers on both the design of the deliberation and interpretation of the data.

The development of the deliberation, which took place over about ten months, resulted in a significantly less robust collaboration than that developed with the City of Edmonton. The deliberation design was handled on a largely consultant-client basis between its two leads, and researchers struggled to gather data associated with this fast-moving project. Communication challenges arose when ABCD leadership and researchers sought to understand how AEEA intended to use the outcomes of the deliberation, and whether and how the final report would be made public. While the two leads worked well together, relationships of trust were never developed between AEEA and the ABCD researchers, which impeded collective learning.

In the end, the deliberation had mixed and somewhat confusing results. As “a very instrumentally framed dialogue” with a constrained time frame of only two hours, the deliberation did not allow citizens to “explore the complexities of climate change” as it related to energy (Haas Lyons 2015). The deliberation’s final report was not made public or delivered to government because of AEEA’s strategic judgments about timing and the usefulness of the results in achieving their political objectives. However, in spite of these challenges, the AEEA executive director found some of “the results were quite useful” in his discussions with government officials and provided “a powerful message” about citizens’ interest in energy efficiency (Row 2015). As well, the distributed deliberation allowed for key learning about the use of online technologies to engage citizens in a deliberation.

Case Study 4: A One-Day Deliberation on Water in a Changing Climate

ABCD’s 2012 competition funded a second deliberation proposal from an ABCD researcher/practitioner team to conduct a deliberation in conjunction with the OWC. The deliberation practitioner had already done consulting work with the OWC, and the researcher had met the executive director of the OWC after delivering a public presentation. OWC had considerable experience in undertaking citizen engagement but deliberation was new to them. The OWC did not have a policy moment that the deliberation could be linked to, nor did their work directly address climate change; but they had an interest in exploring how they might use citizen deliberation in their education and stewardship activities related to land and watershed management to engage citizens on climate change (see chapter 5). ABCD was willing to fund the project because it provided a comparative case study that could extend ABCD’s social learning about citizen deliberation on climate change. The project was called Water in a Changing Climate.

The design and development of the deliberation project were led by the ABCD researcher, who hired a project manager to assist her and consulted with the deliberation practitioner around design. The objective of the deliberation was three-fold: to engage with communities outside of Alberta’s major metropolitan centres; to focus on a different aspect of climate change than energy; and to see what kind of deliberation could be accomplished in a day (Blue 2015). OWC was not heavily invested in the outcome of the deliberation; its leaders were not active in the design of the event and assumed a largely advisory role in the project’s development. This gave the ABCD members scope to design the day-long event in ways that met their interests, particularly the researcher’s interest in framing climate change in terms of adaptation rather than mitigation.

As was the case with the AEEA deliberation, there was a lack of communication between the ABCD members overseeing the Water in a Changing Climate project and the rest of the ABCD team. This breakdown in communication resulted in a lack of data being collected and confusions regarding how the deliberation outcomes would be used by the OWC. Members of ABCD not directly involved in overseeing the deliberation had hoped the OWC would use the results to inform its work, and did not grasp until long after the event that OWC, in understanding the deliberation as a pilot exercise, therefore felt no need to engage directly with citizens’ recommendations (Frank 2015). The executive director of the OWC saw the value of citizen deliberation as “a way to explore issues and solutions and be open-minded,” rather than a way of shaping organizational direction in a more determinate way (Frank 2015). These tensions and gaps around data gathering and research outputs occurred, as with the Food and Agriculture deliberation, primarily between academics, and reflected not only challenges of busy-ness and communication over distance but a failure to settle collaboratively, clearly, and early on the priority of different research outcomes.

There was significant learning about deliberation by particular individuals, but as was the case with the Energy Efficiency Choices deliberation and the Food and Urban Agriculture Citizen Panel, there was a lack of collective learning across ABCD. ABCD’s leadership struggled to communicate with the project team about the development of the project and its results, and to find ways for other ABCD researchers to collaborate on the project. Nevertheless, the Water in a Changing Climate deliberation generated several worthwhile learning opportunities. In addition to learning by citizens, the OWC found the results of the project educational in introducing to them to the deliberation process and the range of citizens’ views on climate change (Frank 2015); the lead researcher spoke of “huge learnings” about project management, deliberation, framing, facilitator training, exploring values, and discussing climate change (Blue 2015); and the practitioner expanded her knowledge of the challenges associated with engaging citizens for a one-day deliberation on climate change (Dale 2015). However, for shared learning to have occurred, these individual experiences and reflections would have needed to go “beyond individuals or small groups to become situated within wider social units or communities of practice” (Reed et al. 2010), which proved a challenge for this project.

A Comparative Analysis

Looking across the four cases, we see several factors that, when combined, support successful collaboration in deliberation projects.

Not unexpectedly, the primary factor that led to deep collaborative relationships was the development of trust. Trust revealed itself as respect for different contexts and cultures of risk in relation to the collaboration and the deliberation being planned, and it enabled organizations with different reasons for partnering to open up their agendas to align their activities and respective trajectories of work in ways that met not only their needs but also the other organization’s needs. Establishing trust helped to build understanding, as well as to support tolerance for misunderstandings that resulted from different institutional and professional cultures, incentive structures, roles, contexts, and paradigms. As the project manager from the City of Edmonton noted:

There is a risk in not knowing these people, not knowing the process, not knowing where this could go, how competent they are, how capable they are, whether we are wasting our time. So those are the sorts of risks we were thinking about. But in terms of our relationship with the different individuals, it evolved over time, and as we became comfortable with their abilities, their competence, their methodologies, the team they were using, their commitment, their professionalism, the comfort level grew. Yeah, and the relationship grew as well. (Andrais 2015)

Mutual trust allowed the negotiation of differences of opinion on how citizen deliberation could play a role in decisions, and even on who “citizens” were in relation to policy and program development; these interpretations are important as they define and constrain the development, form, and outcomes of public dialogue practices (Newman et al. 2004). It also enabled the negotiation of different goals and strategic objectives in relation to the partnership, and different orientations to research and learning.

This is not to say that divergences were always expressed or resolved. While certain members of ABCD sensed uneasiness among some of our partners over the course of the development of deliberations, this was difficult to address directly as such matters were often felt to be internal and political, not ones for public discussion. Trusting relationships enabled collaboration to proceed in spite of these tensions; but this is not to say that trusting relationships bring to light or settle every difference, or that they have to.

Several secondary factors also shaped the quality of the collaborative relationships. First, the most successful collaborations arose when ABCD’s outside partners had a strong investment in outcomes of deliberation: they had something at risk, and a motivation to work collaboratively to manage risks and produce the best outcomes. At times, because of this major investment in outcomes there was a strong incentive for the outside partner—with the capacity to influence decisions—to jump to its own solutions to problems, so there were seeds for disagreement, but also the capacity and incentive to process these disagreements communicatively and collectively. Working through misunderstandings and disagreements, when done effectively, can build or reinforce respectful relationships and mutual trust, which in turn can increase commitment to the deliberative process and to social learning. It also can clarify terminologies, commitments, and goals in ways that lead to individual and social learning, and more successful deliberative processes and outcomes.

A comparison between Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges deliberation and the Water in a Changing Climate project demonstrates how strong interests in the deliberation outcomes translated into deeper collaborations and more useful citizen recommendations. Both the Office of the Environment and ABCD had strong investments in the Edmonton Panel. The project attracted the most commitment from researchers and practitioners in ABCD, and there was involvement from many civil servants. While there were many ups and downs in the development of the project, disagreements and misunderstandings were hashed out in meeting after meeting, building trust and mutual understanding over time, as illustrated by this interview excerpt:

David [and the lead facilitators] were new to us. And that relationship changed and evolved. We watched them and watched how they delivered on their vision, on their program, and so everything we saw was positive and it just convinced us more and more that these were people who were competent, who were committed, who had passion in what they were doing and what they were delivering. In my experience over decades not everybody delivers . . . sometimes they don’t deliver everything they promised, and sometimes expectations are less than what you’d hoped, and in this case the expectations exceeded, or the performance exceeded our expectations right across the board. (Andrais 2015)

In part because of the strength of relationships and trust, project development was given the time it needed to coalesce around a mutually acceptable deliberative exercise. The influence of the Edmonton Panel on city decision making and the uptake it received from elected officials in public debates themselves supported the breadth of learning from the process that is necessary for social learning to occur.

In contrast, the OWC had limited investment in and risk associated with the outcomes of the day-long Water in a Changing Climate event, as they were involved out of a general interest in learning about deliberation rather than an intention to use the outcomes politically. While the OWC did play a key support role in the citizen deliberation, including the provision of small group facilitators and note takers, they did not engage significantly in the planning and design of the dialogue process because they were not looking for any specific kind of feedback or responses to a particular issue. As a result, some of the recommendations that arose out of Water in a Changing Climate were very general and “outside of the purview of the Oldman Watershed” (Blue 2015).

Second, collaborative relationships were strengthened when each organization’s goals were well understood by both parties as a basis for defining shared goals. One effect of this joint contribution and ownership was that information could be shared more broadly, rather than small numbers of players having the prerogative to restrict the circulation of information or research data; trust, communication, and effective collaboration diminishes when such information can be restricted. In hindsight, we see how, in our collaborations, shared goals needed to constantly be revisited and revised. For example, AEEA was invested in the outcomes of the deliberation designed with ABCD, but ABCD’s commitment to deliberation projects that were strongly connected to decision making and to sharing outcomes regardless of how they align with the policy views of a partner created unease for AEEA’s executive director. As a result, given that ABCD researchers were in an ancillary role, decisions were made by AEEA, without consultation with researchers, which adversely affected the collection of quality research data. Time pressures were a factor here too, but more significant was a lack of incentive and structures for collaboratively working through challenges, including around the fit between research and practice.

Notwithstanding the different learning outcomes of the three deliberations that ABCD helped to run, there was in each instance a shared commitment to both strong environmental responses and good citizen involvement; this shared commitment provided an explicit and common basis for each partnership and associated deliberative processes. Office of the Environment staff, the AEEA, OWC, and ABCD members shared a commitment to effective climate action, and there was a sense of solidarity around this. Even though we diverged at times on how good work with citizens would contribute to effective climate policy and action, our shared values around these objectives saw us through tensions and conflicts. This held true within ABCD as well.

Third, trust and shared learning critical to collaboration were strengthened when time and energy were devoted to appropriate and respectful communication about risks and goals (Beattie and Annis 2008; Suarez-Balcazar, Harper, and Lewis 2005). The hurried and pressured circumstances of collaboration often led us to neglect matters like checking in to clarify confusing situations or ask about views and preferences, or carefully exploring what we each needed to get out of the collaboration to feel satisfied and properly supported. Paying more attention to these issues might have supported greater reciprocity and relationship building, which would have lent resilience to our best collaborations; it might also have helped ABCD researchers to notice when we were relating to others in the room as obstacles or objects of persuasion rather than partners in a jointly developed venture. For example, the Water in a Changing Climate project was developed by only one researcher and practitioner within ABCD, with a couple of OWC contacts advising. Researchers outside of this small team were not significantly involved in planning, and when communication broke down around the planning and research, there were limitations to the relationships and collaborative mechanisms that might have resolved these in a mutually acceptable way.

Fourth, the availability of time influenced the success of collaboration. The development of Edmonton’s Energy and Climate Challenges deliberation took eighteen months, whereas the other three cases were each completed from start to finish in less than a year. Collective problem solving can be more difficult, and improbable, in projects where there is intense time pressure, which produces the temptation to delegate work, take shortcuts around collaboration, and limit communication and sharing of project details. The research collaboration with CPI demonstrated well how a lack of time easily undermines a potentially rich collaboration. Even had CPI been interested in partnering more extensively with ABCD, the time pressure they were under to develop research tools and design and execute the deliberation left them with little time or inclination to allow ABCD to shape the common project. Consequently, when disagreements arose, given the limited trust and relationships that had been built, the collaboration largely fell apart. While some useful individual learning took place, it was truncated by unwillingness to share authority in crafting research tools, or to share data after the fact.

As we look over the four cases, we also notice that prior relationships had less salience than one might have supposed. All four of our cases involved prior relationships between ABCD members and key figures in each outside partner, but these relationships do not seem to have influenced outcomes as much as the partner’s degree of investment in outcomes, and the relationships and levels of trust developed or sustained by collaborative decision making over time.

Conclusion

The literature on collaboration shows the importance of diverse stakeholders, common goals, and objectives, well-designed group processes, learning that goes beyond individuals to a community of practice, shared responsibility and power, and uptake by key officials. In this chapter we have used four ABCD cases to foreground important variables in the development of collaborations around citizen deliberations that support the development of trust capable of bridging different organizational needs and objectives; strong investment by outside partners in outcomes of deliberation that can motivate ongoing negotiations of differences; open communication that flows from both shared goals and an understanding of divergences; and sufficient time to address misunderstandings and resolve disputes collaboratively.

ABCD worked with partners to convene citizen deliberations relating to climate change, a quintessentially wicked problem, and to build shared learning out of these collaborations. While many public participation exercises are advertised as achieving such outcomes, our partners at the City of Edmonton reminded us that this is not always the case:

You see all sorts of engagement efforts and you think a lot of them end up in that same sort of bag of checking a box, a conversation, sort of superficial, never really getting into a deep dive to understand the trade-offs associated with whatever the issue is. What you are doing when you are bringing people together to talk about a tough issue is that you are talking about change, and that change has a range of implications and a range of trade-offs. And so that is what we were able to do in this exercise. (Andrais 2015)

We hope that our reflections on the successes and challenges of these collaborations offer inspiration and also encourage appropriate vigilance in researchers or practitioners planning other deliberation projects to address our toughest problems.

1 Ten members or associates with either ABCD, or the City of Edmonton, who had some role in the Edmonton Panel were interviewed at the start of the citizen deliberation (1) and following it (2). To protect the anonymity of the key informants (KI) they have all been assigned a number ranging from 1 - 10 (e.g., KI 1-5 designates this is an interview with the fifth key informant before the deliberations).

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