by Elze Vermaas
“Do it well or don’t do it at all,” says expert Eva Rovers on the organisation of citizens’ assemblies — the closing message of her book. Trust in democracy is in decline, and citizens’ assemblies hold the potential to help restore that trust. But as a Dutch saying goes: “Trust arrives on foot and leaves on horseback.” The need to organise citizens’ assemblies well is important, and, as I hope to show, can be seen as a practice of care, rooted in a caring democracy.
Even though democracy is now often reframed by the radical right solely as ‘the voice of the majority of the people’ – curiously, a voice ideally spoken only by its leaders – when democracy came about in Athens, its idea was to restructure government into bodies where rich as well as poor citizens were compelled to sit together in assemblies, debate, compromise, and rotate roles through sortition. As Erica Benner shows in her book Adventures in Democracy, democracy came about as a realistic solution to a concrete problem: how to end the ongoing civil strife caused by deep inequalities in personal and social security between the wealthy and the rest of society. For centuries, this was widely accepted as common democratic sense — yet it seems to have faded from view. Every thinker, including Benner, that I spoke to about democracy echoed the same concern: rising inequality poses a serious threat to democratic life. It is therefore perhaps no surprise that modern citizens’ assemblies, which draw on this earlier conception of democracy, are re-emerging. And while such assemblies may not address inequality directly, the fact that a statistically representative cross-section of the population gathers to deliberate on shared concerns increases the chances that these disparities will be acknowledged — and, potentially, confronted.
But how can we conceptualise citizens’ assemblies, or democracy more broadly, in relation to care? Fisher and Tronto’s definition of care already offers some insight: ‘On the most general level, we suggest that caring be viewed as a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our world so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, ourselves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.’ They view care as an activity. However, in Tronto’s book Caring Democracy, she explores the relationship between care and democracy in more depth. What she refers to as caring involves, as a citizen in a democracy, caring both for fellow citizens and for democracy itself. The aim of such practices is to ensure that all members of society can live as well as possible by making society as democratic as possible. She reminds us that the concept of democratic care has its roots in feminist discourse, particularly in concerns about power. ‘Caring democracy thus requires a commitment to genuine equality of voice, and of reducing power differentials as much as possible, in order to create the conditions for a meaningful democratic discussion of the nature of responsibility in society.’
Care in that sense becomes, among other things, the activity of creating those conditions, but how to obtain those conditions, and how to maintain and repair them? Because achieving true representation – and especially creating a space where every voice is heard and each person can engage in deliberation on an equal footing – is no small task. Each citizens’ assembly consists of four key elements that must all be taken into account to create the right conditions. The first is agenda-setting and the design phase; the second is the selection process; the third is deliberation; and the fourth is implementation. In this article, I will focus primarily on the second and third elements.
How do you ensure all citizens are reached for a citizens’ assembly? What do they need in order to be able to participate? Tronto briefly discusses deliberation in her book and highlights a crucial point: there are still people who need to clean or who are involved in other care work – can they realistically take part? Care is not – as one spokesperson from a citizens’ assembly once replied to my question about whether they could easily reach all groups in society – simply a matter of sending everyone a letter and considering the job done if certain marginalised groups fail to respond. Some groups find it more difficult to attend – and that’s where care comes into play.
During my research, I’ve encountered many ways to ensure that marginalised groups can attend and also keep on participating in the assembly. For example, providing child care can make it easier for (single) parents to take part. Simultaneous translation can ease language barriers. Often, a daily allowance is provided to participants. Mobility or digital access can cause a problem for some people. However, barriers are of course not only physical or economic – young people, for example, can easily worry that they do not yet know enough to take part. Having a facilitator who checks in with them after each session, or having an informal moment with all young participants before the assembly, can be a way to prevent them from dropping out. Or how to reach out to groups that have low trust in the institutions? In the permanent climate citizen assembly in Brussels, organisations that already worked with the groups that were hard to reach were asked to communicate about the assembly. Citizens of these groups were invited to self-nominate through these organisations, rather than being contacted via formal letters — although, like all other participants, they could only join the assembly after a second weighted lottery.
However, it is not only about striving to reach all groups of citizens; it is also about recognising that statistical representation still means minorities will remain minorities within the assembly. For instance, there may be only one Indigenous person present, which can lead to tokenism and place undue pressure on that individual to represent the full breadth of experiences faced by their community. One possible solution is to oversample marginalised groups, ensuring more than one representative is present. Another approach is sequential deliberation, in which the participant consults with their community before each session, helping them feel more prepared and supported in the assembly process.
One of the challenges, when all citizens are brought together in the same space, is to avoid replicating existing power structures. This is where I would like to draw on bell hooks’ book Teaching to Transgress. She viewed the classroom as a space where dominant power structures should not be reproduced, and she outlines several methods that are also highly relevant for citizens’ assemblies.
hooks emphasises the importance of recognising diverse forms of experience, and the need to cultivate a sense of community among everyone present. In citizens’ assemblies too, it is vital that participants become familiar with one another. An informal moment at the start can help ease people into the process – one of the reasons why these assemblies often take place in person.
hooks also found it important that her students could share personal experiences, and relate them to the academic texts that were studied. Similarly, an assembly might deliberately begin by giving space for citizens to share their lived experiences before introducing external expert knowledge. This not only enriches the conversation but also allows participants to get to know each other and feel more familiar.
It also speaks to the recognition of different ways of learning and processing information. A guided walk through a nature reserve can be just as valuable for understanding climate issues as a data presentation, just as hearing the lived experiences of women who have undergone illegal abortions can profoundly inform discussions in a citizen assembly on abortion policy. Stories can be a powerful way of conveying knowledge, alongside graphs and written texts – which are less accessible. In the Global Citizens’ Assembly for COP26, for example, the Knowledge and Wisdom Committee included both academic experts and Indigenous representatives, to ensure the inclusion of Indigenous knowledge systems.
hooks also points out that the body must be allowed to be present in learning – not just the intellect. Within assemblies, it can be helpful to make explicit that emotions are welcome. As hooks writes, difference does not always make things easier. She recounts how, when she first began discussing her ideas about teaching with fellow professors: ‘A lot of people panicked. What they saw happening was not the comforting “melting pot” idea of cultural diversity, the rainbow coalition where we would all be grouped together in our difference, but everyone wearing the same have-a-nice-day smile. This was the stuff of colonizing fantasy, a perversion of the progressive vision of cultural diversity.’ Good facilitation is therefore key to ensure that everyone is able to speak. Facilitators and moderators, from diverse backgrounds, that are trained in anti-oppressive facilitation and understand how disadvantage is intersectional. It can also be important to acknowledge and address systemic discrimination and power imbalances in the assembly.
It is just as important that organisers themselves reflect diversity and inclusion. Without this, critical design flaws can emerge. In the Global Citizens’ Assembly for COP26, for instance, a farmer from the Global South noted that economic compensation did not truly make up for lost labour income or the potential long-term financial impact. His commitment to participating in the assembly therefore came in addition to his daily work. A study on inclusivity in citizens’ assemblies recommended that these processes should be designed from the perspective of the most marginalised groups.The fact that citizen assemblies commit to genuine equality of voice and reducing power differentials as much as possible in order to create the conditions for a meaningful democratic discussion is, in itself, an act of care. As I have illustrated through various considerations and examples, this is far from simple. Drawing once more on bell hooks, it is crucial for people coordinating or facilitating to remain open ‘to move’ – i.e., to be flexible and willing to learn, adapt or repair when needed. It’s an advantage of permanent citizens’ assemblies that there is the possibility to learn from each cycle. At the same time, such practices would be far more effective in a society that fosters these kinds of democratic spaces more broadly — not only in the form of assemblies, but also through commons and other shared spaces. In doing so, the lived experience of democracy and active participation in collective decision-making can become part of everyday life, allowing even those who have not yet taken part in an assembly to develop an intuitive understanding of what such a process involves.
But let’s end with hooks, because I believe her statement could also be applied to spaces like citizen assemblies: ‘The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom, with all its limitations, remains a location of possibility. In that field of possibility we have the opportunity to labor for freedom, to demand of ourselves and our comrades, an openness of mind and heart that allows us to face reality even as we collectively imagine ways to move beyond boundaries, to transgress. This is education as the practice of freedom.’
Elze Vermaas works at the Belgian social-ecological think tank Oikos and has contributed to a transnational research project on deliberative democracy. Her interests also include themes such as degrowth and ecofeminism. She is co-author of the book Enough: Thriving Societies Beyond Growth. She previously worked as a secondary school teacher and served as vice-chair of Jong Wetenschappelijk Bureau GroenLinks, the youth wing of the Dutch green think tank.