Once imagined as a theoretical possibility, global citizen deliberation is now beginning to appear in the practice of governance. How should global citizens' forums be constituted? A largely unexamined consensus on random selection as the ideal method to locate citizen participants has fractured as its limitations become more apparent. We undertake a systematic comparative examination of random selection and its alternatives, emphasizing, respectively, demographic diversity, discursive diversity, developmental participation, and affectedness. These alternatives are evaluated in terms of how well they promote inclusive and high-quality deliberation within the forum; how well they facilitate broader functions such as recommending policy decisions, providing information to policy makers on the distribution of informed global opinion, enhancing macro-level deliberation, and strengthening global discourses and publics; and how well they secure the perceived legitimacy of a forum. We show how different sorts of recruitment and representation might be combined to good effect, in the context of a proposal for a global citizens' assembly on genome editing.
Policy Implications
- Designers of global citizens' forums should not uncritically take statistical representativeness through random selection (or its surrogates) as the ideal for constituting these forums.
- Practitioners should bear in mind the purpose of the forum, which has significant implications for how participant selection should proceed.
- Selection methods emphasizing demographic diversity, discursive diversity, developmental participation, and affectedness all have positive qualities.
- Practically, it will often make sense to combine these methods, not in any fixed formula, but in a context-specific learning process.
Photo by Willian Santos