Deliberation as a Key to Community Engagement

Hartz-Karp J¹*

1. Office of the Minister for Planning and Infrastructure, Maylands, Western Australia, Australia

As a result of the last four years of planning with the community, Western Australia is now one of the world leaders in innovative approaches to deliberative democracy.

This presentation will outline the variety of techniques that have been applied, adapted and combined, including Citizen’s Juries, Consensus Conferences, Consensus Forums, Deliberative Surveys, Multi Criteria Analysis Conferences, Enquiry by Design and ‘21st Century Town Meetings’. The focus will be on how representativeness, deliberation and influence have been sought, and what has been learnt.

Participants will have the opportunity to discuss their own examples of potential areas for community engagement. Examples will be given of how similar problems have been addressed elsewhere. Participants will help one another with devising potential techniques to address the issues. Critical success factors will be outlined and applied to each example.

Learning Objectives

• To understand how different deliberative democracy techniques have been applied and adapted;
• To examine the critical success factors of deliberative democracy initiatives;
• To apply this learning so each participant has the opportunity to devise ways to address their community engagement opportunities.

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