Beginning with the End in Mind: A Call for Goal-Driven Deliberative Practice

This briefing describes a framework for deliberative democracy practitioners to increase the impact of community communication events. [Wikipedia on deliberative democracy: “also sometimes called discursive democracy, is a system of political decisions based on … direct democracy and representative democracy that relies on citizen deliberation to make sound policy. In contrast to the traditional theory of democracy, in which voting is central, deliberative democracy theorists argue that legitimate lawmaking can arise only through public deliberation by the people.”]

From the Introduction: "This essay presents a conceptual framework to help practitioners more systematically consider both the short-term and long-term strategies that inform and guide their efforts. The framework outlines six distinct but interrelated goals for deliberative practitioners to target, organized in three groups."

These are:

1. First-order goals - issue learning, improved democratic attitudes, and improved democratic skills. These primarily educational goals essentially involve the (re)building of critical social capital that can then be utilised to support the second- and third-order goals.
   
2. Second-order goals - include improved community action and improved institutional decision making.
3. Third-order goal - improved community problem solving.
   

The Six Goals of Deliberation are the following:

• Issue Learning - The brief emphasises deliberation's positive impact on public understanding of issues including: increased awareness of a range of perspectives; identifying the shared interests or common ground that exists across diverse perspectives; and generating new information and inspiring innovative responses to problems.
• Improving Democratic Attitudes - Three primary consequences of deliberation that practitioners can focus on to improve democratic attitudes include: increasing participants’ sense of efficacy or empowerment; creation and improvement of community relationships, particularly between individuals with opposing perspectives; and helping individuals adjust their preferences and develop a better balance between their own self-interest and the interests of the community.
  
• Improving Democratic Skills - High-quality deliberative events can yield three key areas of skill development, including: improvement of communication skills to address differences; the improvement of skills related to judgement, wisdom, and group decision making; and moving participants to become organisers by sharpening event-hosting skills.
• Improving Community Action - Deliberative practices can have a number of positive impacts on the quality of community action that practitioners can nurture, including: deliberation the can lead to more individual and community action on common problem and also lead to a more collaborative and inclusive kind of individual and community action; help communities develop a sense of empowerment and possibility particularly distinct from the actions of government; and spark more traditional involvement beyond the "usual suspects", helping support the development of citizens as engaged problem solvers.
  
• Improving Institutional Decision Making - As institutional practices become more deliberative, a number of positive impacts can occur, which practitioners can cultivate, including: institutional decisions made in concert with high-quality deliberative processes - likely, as stated here, to be more legitimate and sustainable; help for institutional decision makers to consider the potential of the public and thus better consider their role as convener and catalyst rather than primary problem solver; and deliberative efforts that also increase the ability for office holders to take on difficult issues.
  
• Improving Community Problem Solving - This final goal is characterised as the ultimate goal of deliberative practice. "...[A]t its best and most effective, community problem solving is a democratic activity that involves the community on multiple levels, ranging from individual action to institutional action at the extremes, but also includes all points in between that involve groups, organisations, non-profits, businesses, etc.... Deliberation must be considered a key tool along multiple points to help communities strive for the vision of deliberative democracy. From this perspective, institutional decision making is not the ultimate result of democratic practice.....One tangible way to consider the difference [between improved community action - institutional decisionmaking and improved community problem solving] is that the second-order goals are particularly issue-focused, whereas the third-order goal is focused more broadly on capacity building and overall community processes. Pushing further, however, in important ways, improving community problem solving, as well as the concepts of democratic or collaborative governance, transcend the distinction between community action and institutional decision making, making them less relevant."
  

The document concludes that by being both pragmatic and visionary, practitioners can use deliberative principles to build civic capacity and facilitate change in the political culture.