Hello, folks I received this from a colleague on the research team listed here and thought Id pass it on to you. If you have any questions please do not reply to me but to the individuals listed below. Thanks, Lisa Heft *** Dear colleagues, We are writing to ask for your help. LogoLink and the Participation Group at IDS are working with our US partner, the Deliberative Democracy Consortium (DDC), on an international project on mapping deliberative and participatory processes in policy making. The DDC is a network of practitioners, researchers and policy makers working to renew democracy through strengthening citizen participation and deliberation. In this project, we are working together to try to get a better understanding of the thousands of examples around the world in which citizens are involved through discussion and participation in decision-making processes. We invite your participation in this exercise, and hope you will take about 15-20 minutes to complete the survey, as well as to send it on to others in your network. Background A widely recognized gap in the field of deliberative democracy is the lack of a synthesis of the context, purposes, design and institutional connection of a range of experiments in deliberationdecision-making through discussionthat are currently employed around the world. The Mapping Project will seek to collect a broad sample of initiativesincluding living traditions like the kgotla in Southern Africa or panchayat in India to modern community forums like a Citizens¹ Jury or the Brazilian Participatory Budgetthat demonstrate the following characteristics: -- Inclusion: seek the participation of a broad, representative sample of the public in an inclusive manner, in some instances making special efforts to include politically under-represented groups. -- Discussion: engage community members in discussion, with one another, perhaps with experts, and often with decision-makers prior to generating advice or recommendations to government. -- Impact: attempt to influence real-world decision-making around a range of outcomes that can include budget, planning, policy or administrative procedures (such as regulation) at some level of government (i.e. local, state, national, etc). Working with a grant from the Deliberative Democracy Consortium, a small team of international scholar-practitioners, will address this gap by conducting a scan of the worldwide field of practice. The mapping exercise will seek to draw upon existing mapping efforts and will pay particular attention to regions that may be underrepresented in the existing literature and research networks. This mapping exercise will produce several outcomes, among them: 1) A written report of findings that includes a typology of methods used around the world 2) An online database for the sharing of information about these practices, that will be publicly available. The mapping effort will support the advance of deliberative democracy in the following ways: 1) Promote networking among practitioners and researchers in various parts of the globe; 2) Generate an interesting snapshot of the state of practice around the world; 3) Establish a useful starting point for further research. Research team members are: Lyn Carson, School of Economics and Political Science, The University of Sydney (Australia); Jan Elliott, Senior Associate, Public Policy Forum (Canada); John Gaventa, Fellow, Institute for Development Studies, University of Sussex (United Kingdom); Leane Nurse, Program Analyst, US EPA National Center for Environmental Innovation (United States); Lars Hasselblad Torres, Researcher, AmericaSpeaks (United States). Instructions You can complete the survey online at, http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=27135485798 Please complete the survey by February 28, 2005. If you will use the online survey, please note that you may exit at any time and your results will be saved but you must return to the survey using the same computer IP address. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact our Paola Brambilla (p.brambi...@ids.ac.uk). Please feel free to pass this survey along to colleagues whom you know who are also working in this field. Again, our sincere thanks for your consideration and for your participation. We look forward to sharing the results! Very warm regards, John Gaventa and Paola Brambilla
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