The State Government in Western Australia has portrayed itself as a champion of revitalising local democracy and civic engagement. This can be seen in the plethora of community consultation/participation policy documents that have emerged from the Premier’s Citizens and Civics Unit over the past five years. Dialogue with the City, a major participatory planning process that formed part of the development of a new strategic plan—Network City—for metropolitan Perth, has been heralded as an exemplar of deliberative democracy. This paper draws on deliberative democratic theory, performative policy analysis and institutional discourse analysis to interrogate the efficacy of this claim by examining the discursive practices leading up to and including the Community Forum, a major consultative and participatory event of the Dialogue Initiative.

At the 2008 National Conference on Dialogue & Deliberation, we focused on 5 challenges identified by participants at our past conferences as being vitally important for our field to address. This is one in a series of five posts featuring the final reports from our “challenge leaders.” Evaluation Challenge: Demonstrating that dialogue and deliberation works [...]

Craig Freshley’s book, “The Wisdom of Group Decisions is a collection of 100 one-page tips for avoiding conflict and making thoughtful, equitable, lasting group decisions for our communities, our organizations, our governments, our families, our Earth. Each tip is a provocative meditation and the book as a whole is a complete toolkit. Angus King, former [...]

Philanthropy for Active Civic Engagement (PACE) released its 8-page white paper “An Evolving Relationship: Executive Branch Approaches to Civic Engagement and Philanthropy” in May 2010. This white paper is based on a briefing memo prepared for a White House meeting earlier in 2010 between leaders of the philanthropic community and Executive Branch officials. The meeting [...]

Teaching Democracy in Public Administration: a TDI catalyst paper on trends and future prospects is a 2008 white paper written by Matt Leighninger and produced by The Democracy Imperative and the Deliberative Democracy Consortium. The paper addresses the challenges faced by public administration educators, who are responding to trends toward democratic governance in the field. [...]

Possibilities for Transformational Conferences is an 8-page primer on how to plan events for 50 or more people that are interactive, engaging, and generally fabulous. Author Tree Bressen (with Debby Sugarman and Sunrise Facilitation) briefly introduces techniques for making events more participatory and engaging, including Open Space Technology, World Cafe, Appreciative Inquiry, fishbowls, “speed dating,” [...]

When it comes to online activities such as contributing money, contacting a government official or signing an online petition, the wealthy and well-educated continue to lead the way. Still, there are hints that the new forms of civic engagement anchored in blogs and social networking sites could alter long-standing patterns. The Internet and Civic Engagement [...]

Fake public participation is widespread in United States government and in governments all over the world. Since fake public participation undermines true public participation, good government advocates should work to deter it. Fake public participation is a subset of fake democracy and occurs for the same reason: we live in an era when democracy is [...]

The July 2007 report by Barnett Pearce, Ph.D. (pictured), Reclaiming Democracy: Changing the Way We Talk about Critical Issues, has the subtitle “A Report of a Project to Engage Legislators in Dialogue and Suggestions for Moving Forward.” This report to the Kettering Foundation describes and reflects on a project done by a few members of [...]

This 2008 book by Peter Block (Berrett-Koehler Publishers) is an exploration of the exact way community can emerge from fragmentation: How is community built? How does the transformation occur? What fundamental shifts are involved? He explores a way of thinking about our places that creates an opening for authentic communities to exist and details what [...]