Deliberative Integrity: Risks and Responses in Mini-Public Governance

Report Launch

11 Feb 2025 (Tues)
12:00 - 13:00 GMT

Online only

You are invited to the online launch of Deliberative Integrity: Risks and Responses in Mini-Public Governance, authored by Lucy J. Parry and Nicole Curato. The report examines the challenges facing deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) or sortition-based forums for citizen deliberation, such as citizens' assemblies, deliberative polls, and citizens' juries.

The launch will provide an overview of the report’s key findings, including the five main risk areas that can undermine the integrity of DMPs and responses to these risks. The report is informed by interviews with over 60 academics, practitioners, advocates, and practitioners of DMPs from around the world. The report offers practical strategies to strengthen the alignment of the governance of DMPs with the principles of deliberative democracy.

This event is open to anyone interested in democratic innovations and the governance of citizen deliberation.

Speakers

Lucy J Parry is a Senior Research Associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She has been involved in organising deliberative processes in practice and her research on deliberative systems and democratic innovations. She is co-editor of the Journal of Deliberative Democracy and the Deliberative Democracy Digest.

Nicole Curato is a Professor of Political Sociology at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra. She is the Chief Investigator of the research project on Deliberative Integrity funded by the Australian Research Council.

Discussants

Tessa Dunlop has worked at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre since 2017. Currently she is a policy analyst at the Competence Centre on Participatory and Deliberative Democracy. Tessa completed her PhD at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Prior to this work, Tessa was a television journalist at Thomson Reuters in Hong Kong. Her research interests include ecological economics and the long term policy and institutional impact of democratic innovations.

Damien du Preez is a Research Coordinator for the Centre for Research on Democracy (CREDO) at Stellenbosch University, for which he co-chairs a collaborative effort to design, convene, and evaluate South Africa's first citizens' assembly. As an MA student at Goethe University Frankfurt, he assists on the European i4i Project as part of the Democratic Innovations Research Unit.

Marjan H. Ehsassi is the Executive Director of FIDE – North America (the Federation for Innovation in Democracy North America. She has been deeply involved in the research, design and implementation of several citizens’ assemblies in France, Belgium, Canada and the US and served as one of four guarantors of the French Citizens’ Convention on the End of Life and on the Oversight Committee of the G1000 We Need to Talk Citizens’ Panels.

Moderator

Oliver Escobar is Professor of Public Policy and Democratic Innovation at the University of Edinburgh. He works on participatory and deliberative democracy, with a focus on public participation, policy innovation, the commons, political inequalities, and the governance of the future.