Nicole Curato, Hans Asenbaum, Ricardo Mendonça, and Selen Ercan launching their book, Research Methods in Deliberative Democracy (along with Jonathan Pickering, Mollu Scudder, and Carolyn Hendriks; photo by David Beach)
I started my career researching and writing about deliberative democracy. If you haven’t encountered this term before, it’s a reference to an ideal form of democratic organization and behavior. This ideal informs a number of democratic processes intended to complement the typical functioning of representative democracies by establishing a direct link between citizens and the collective decisions that bind them. Think, for example, public consultations such as town-hall meetings, citizen assemblies, citizen initiative reviews, and deliberative polls. All of these innovations are based on the ideal of informed public discussion, involving the inclusive sharing of perspectives and reasons toward a broad-based agreement. This agreement, ideally, expresses the consent to a decision that becomes a policy or law by all those affected. It’s a lovely ideal, up there with the axiom of treating all humans as ends in themselves, as moral equals.
For a number of years, I turned away from this research. Although in love with the ideal, I felt that real-world practices of deliberative democracy were, well, illusory. Specifically, as I discuss in my 2015 book, Democratic Illusion, they serve to uphold pre-existing interests and, ultimately, the status quo. I didn’t express this at the time, but they likely serve to entrench liberal democratic institutions. Indeed, they likely entrench colonial ways of governing.
A couple of years ago, friends at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at the University of Canberra starting pulling me back in. Hans, Nicole, Ricardo, and Selen encouraged me to apply my critical orientation to theorizing about decolonizing deliberative democracy.
It’s been wonderful to (re)connect with this group. They’ve been so thoughtful as they’ve engaged with my argument that deliberative democracy cannot be decolonized. Honestly, I’m not sure if that’s true. But, it’s been important for me to trace the colonial history and logic of liberal democracy and, by extension, of its procedural and institutional innovations. It’s been important for me to provoke a discussion about the very real limitations of any reforms to liberal democracies imported to/imposed on Indigenous territories.
Recently, the Canberra crew published a working paper series on the issue. Please check it out. And, of course, please have a read of my piece — remember, it’s a provocation!