Citizens’ Assemblies: Practices, Visions, and Possible Futures

Citizens’ assemblies are one of today’s most exciting democratic innovations: randomly selected citizens come together to deliberate on major political issues and generate policy recommendations. Such formats offer several advantages: they demonstrate trust in citizens’ political judgment and promote inclusive deliberation, political learning processes, and the public expression of previously neglected perspectives. But they have also faced criticism, for example for their often limited political influence, too much focus on consensus-oriented solutions, and the fact that it is usually the better-off and better-educated who tend to accept invitations to participate. The workshop takes stock of current uses of citizens’ assemblies and analyzes both their advantages and their shortcomings. It elaborates ways in which citizens’ assemblies can be further developed to enhance their ability to deepen citizen participation and strengthen democratic resilience. 

For Registration: manon.westphal@tum.de 

Program

11.30am             Welcome and Introduction

11.45am             Graham Smith (London): Good governance or revolutionary confrontation with the carbon state? The many faces of citizens’ assemblies

1.00pm                Lunch Break

2.00pm                Azucena Morán (Potsdam): A citizens' assembly is... insights from anti-colonial theories of deliberation

3.00pm                Break

3.15pm                Melisa Ross (Bremen): Global Citizen Deliberation and the limits of deliberative practice

4.15pm                Break

4.30pm                Manon Westphal (Munich): Deliberative mini-publics or tribunates? Diversifying citizen assembly models

5.30pm                Final Discussion

5.45pm                End of the Workshop