However, this doesn’t mean we should throw the baby out with the bath water!
#Citizens voice full
Not all issues lend themselves to these specific methodologies and sometimes the specific approaches contained within these methodologies can be challenging or difficult for governments to pursue in full unchanged. However, they only work in certain circumstances and for the right problem or issue. Used appropriately these methodologies can be transformative in assisting you to overcome the challenges identified earlier in this article. Citizens’ juries, participatory budgeting and deliberative polling. There are a range of deliberative democratic processes that you may have heard of…. The practice of deliberative democracy offers a range of principles and approaches that can help in creating the right environment to bridge divides and share information thus, building the relationship between government and community. So what does government do? How can government work to build understanding of the complexity underpinning key policy issues? How can governments help to bring citizens across the spectrum of views together to discuss those issues and come to conclusions together about the best way forward? Directions that all citizens can live with and even support? As not acting in accordance with the weight of community view results in a disenfranchised community and undermines trust between citizens and the government but acting in accordance can have significant risks or negative consequences. Undeniably governments and the public sectors that support them are in an invidious position. What should a government do when it has two petitions with similar levels of support but opposing views? Or what should a government do where the weight of community support is for an approach/ policy that doesn’t stand up to the briefest analysis or is in direct conflict with the weight of academic research and scientific evidence? The challenge of course is that the views expressed through these mediums are invariably polarised and more often than not, ill informed. Whether it be Facebook, Twitter, online petitions or others… citizens’ want to have a say and they want governments to respond accordingly. We have seen the emergence of a plethora of online tools designed to raise the voices of individuals, build communities of similar thinkers and ultimately influence the agendas of government.
Across the world we are seeing an increasing trend towards citizens wanting to have a voice in how they are governed.
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