To address citizens’ calls for better representation and more opportunities to participate in decision making, public authorities from all levels of government are increasingly turning to citizens' assemblies, citizens’ juries, and other representative deliberative processes to tackle complex policy problems. Starting in the 1980s, the trend has not only continued, but gained strength in recent years: the OECD has identified close to 600 examples, of which over 80 were implemented in the last two years alone (OECD Database of Representative Deliberative Processes and Institutions, 2021). This demonstrates the interest of OECD Members in representative deliberative processes to reinforce democracy.
Since its onset in 2019, the COVID-19 pandemic has brought unprecedented challenges for government and had direct implications for citizen participation, civic space, transparency, and access to information. The need for even more participation and deliberation to support democratic systems during an exceptional period has fuelled innovation in the field. For example, the impossibility of bringing people together physically has led practitioners to experiment with hybrid and online deliberation, demonstrating that such processes are possible, even under complex circumstances (Chwalisz, 2021).
Yet, the increasing use of representative deliberative processes exposes the lack of, and highlights the need for, specific guidance for their evaluation. In this context, the OECD has developed the guidelines in this report for policy makers and practitioners who want to evaluate the representative deliberative processes they initiate, commission, and implement. It establishes minimum standards and criteria for the evaluation of representative deliberative processes.
The purpose of this report is to encourage public authorities, organisers, and evaluators to conduct more comprehensive, objective, and comparable evaluations. This will allow policy makers, observers, and the public to gauge the quality of their representative deliberative processes, learn from past experiences, and, ultimately, help them initiate and develop better processes. In addition, a common framework for evaluations can generate data for comparative analysis.
These guidelines do not aim to be prescriptive or fully comprehensive. Instead, they provide a foundation of evaluation criteria on which more comprehensive evaluations can be built by adding additional criteria according to specific contexts and needs. The focus of this document is evaluation of the way deliberative processes are set up and conducted. Further research is needed, for instance, to provide guidelines for the evaluation of their long-term impact and wider effects.
These guidelines are part of the work undertaken by the OECD Public Governance Directorate on open government, and build on the 2020 OECD report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave. Furthermore, the OECD report Improving Governance with Policy Evaluation: Lessons From Country Experiences (2020b) demonstrates that policy evaluation practices can be a tool for governments to increase effectiveness and promote accountability and trust.
The methodology of developing these guidelines included: comparing existing evaluation frameworks for representative deliberative processes, iterative drafting with the OECD Advisory Group of Evaluating Deliberative Processes; collaborating with the Democracy R&D Network to develop the questions in the evaluation questionnaires; incorporating feedback from the OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Network; and review and approval by the OECD Working Party on Open Government and Public Governance Committee.
The OECD’s new Initiative on Reinforcing Democracy will provide further possibilities to explore how to strengthen existing democratic institutions and establish new ones though participation and representation. Building on this report, and the evaluations it inspires, lessons and recommendations could be drawn on how to design better deliberative processes, and practices can be analysed and shared to identify what works best in different contexts. Beyond evaluation, the OECD guide on Eight Ways to Institutionalise Deliberative Democracy (2021) identifies a range of ways to embed public deliberation and civic lotteries in existing democratic institutions. This work opens up new possibilities for governments to make meaningful citizen deliberation a permanent part of how public decisions are taken, as a key step towards strengthening democracy.