Reprinted from Public Sector Digest, Summer 2010 Photo: Naotake Murayama Key Aspects of the Deliberative Democracy Movement By Martín Carcasson & Leah Sprain, Center for Public Deliberation, Colorado State University In a growing number of communities across the globe, individuals are turning to more deliberative and collaborative processes—such as community dialogues, issue forums, stakeholder negotiation processes, and other inclusive public participation efforts 1 —in order to address their most important problems. Deliberative democracy is an approach to politics in which citizens, not just experts or politicians, are deeply involved in public decision making and problem-solving. Often working with trained facilitators who utilize a variety of techniques, citizens representing a broad range of stakeholders come together and consider relevant facts and values from multiple points of view; listen to one another in order to think critically about the various options before them and consider the underlying tensions and tough choices inherent to most public issues; and ultimately seek to come to some conclusion for action based on a reasoned public judgment. These processes are being developed and sustained by civically minded individuals involved with a 1 For a overview of many of the basic processes, see John Gastil & Peter Levine, (Eds.) The deliberative democracy handbook: Strategies for effective civic engagement in the 21 st century (New York: Jossey-Bass, 2001) or Peggy Holman, Tom Devane, Steven Cady, The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today’s Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems (2d ed.) (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2007). NCDD also has a useful short document available online that identifies four particular streams of engagement (exploration, conflict transformation, decision-making, and collaborative action), and highlights a number of specific techniques and processes for each. Available online at http://www.thataway.org/?page_id=1487 .