the key elements of this innovative process that make it a model for others elsewhere:“Implementation should be considered from the start, not as an afterthought. The format of the final recommendations, the process for final approval, and the time needed to ensure this part of the process does not get neglected need to be considered in the early design stages of the assembly.Dedicated time and resources for transforming recommendations into legislation are also crucial for successful implementation. Bringing citizens, politicians, and civil servants together in the final stages can help bridge the gap between recommendations and action. While it has been more typical for citizens’ assemblies to draft recommendations that they then hand onward to elected officials and civil servants, who review them and then respond to the citizens’ assembly, the Parisian model demonstrates another way.Collaborative workshops where consensus amongst the triad of actors is needed adds more time to the process, but ensures that there is a high level of consensus for the final output, and reduces the time that would have been needed for officials to review and respond to the citizens’ assembly’s recommendations.Formal institutional integration of citizens’ assemblies through legal measures can help ensure their recommendations are taken seriously and ensures the assembly’s continuity regardless of shifts in government. The citizens’ assembly has become a part of Paris’s democratic architecture, as have other permanent citizens’ assemblies elsewhere. While one-off assemblies typically depend on political will at a moment in time and risk becoming politicized — i.e. in being associated with the party that initially launched the first one — an institutionalized citizens’ assembly anchored in policy and political decision-making helps to set the foundation for a new institution that can endure.It is also important that there is regular engagement with all political parties and stakeholders throughout the process. This helps build cross-partisan support for final recommendations, as well as more sustainable support for the enduring nature of the permanent citizens assembly.”

Recently, the Paris Citizens’ Assembly — a permanent body institutionalized in 2021 as part of the city’s governing apparatus — pioneered a new way to work closely with the government so that citizens’ voices are not only heard but heeded. On a rotating basis, it brings together 100 residents of Paris, drawn by lot, to meet for one year in working groups facilitated by expert advice, deliberate policy choices on pressing issues and make recommendations to the elected council.

Discourse within the public sphere signals the normative will of the democratic citizenry to the steering institutions of governance. It also articulates and rearticulates (expresses and reshapes) the core of the civic, the vital beating heart of a democracy. This core is a political morality of intentional action motivated by reasoned understanding and moral imagination. In the political morality I see emerging, the separation of the political and the normative is subsiding. Conceptually, power and right are becoming entangled rather than bifurcated. 

As I use the term here, “governance” is not limited to the official activities of government alone. Governance in the broad sense is an interlocking system of collective action steering mechanisms ideally guided by impartial rules of law and comprised of the administrative and representative political institutions of government, economic and sociological institutions, and cultural systems of norms, meanings, and relationships. In a democracy, the steering of these systems of collective action is ultimately subject to judgments concerning the justice and legitimacy of current and proposed future governance by a discursive participatory citizenry. This citizenry continually engages in a process of pluralistic debate refereed by reason and the persuasive force of the better argument. Such participatory dialogue is often referred to as the civic or “public sphere” of society. It is a place of norms and ideals—a declarative place of what is the case, and a subjunctive place of what could be the case.

more democratic pathway

But community must not mean a shedding of our differences, nor the pathetic pretense that these differences do not exist

“One of the great things about Bitcoin is its lack of democracy”

But politics is about who shows up. The fossil fuel interests that are threatened show up. Nerds like Urban, vaguely repulsed by politics, do not.

There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.

If we believe in equality, if we believe in participatory democracy and participatory culture, if we believe in people and progressive social change, if we believe in sustainability in all its environmental and economic and psychological manifestations, then we need to do better than slap that adjective “open” onto our projects and act as though that’s sufficient or — and this is hard, I know — even sound.