Varieties of Civic Innovation: Deliberative, Collaborative, Network, and Narrative Approaches - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826520006 ISBN 13: 9780826520005

Verlag: Univ of Chicago Press behalf of Vanderbilt Univ. P, 2014

Inhaltsangabe

In this collection of original essays, empirical analysts and theorists across disciplines turn a critical eye to a variety of recent institutional forms and styles of innovation. They examine lived reality and theoretical underpinning, promise and accomplishment, but also the pitfalls and capacity-building challenges that face virtually all attempts to bring citizen voice, knowledge, and skill to the center of public problem solving. Their analyses are both hopeful and hard-headed and are guided by commitments to help understand appropriate fit and realistic sustainability. Cases include face-to-face deliberation, online networking and citizen journalism, policy forums, and community and stakeholder planning sessions across local, state and federal contexts. Policy issues run a broad gamut from community and regional economic development and environmental sustainability to minority rights and gay marriage.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Carmen Sirianni is the Morris Hillquit Professor at Brandeis University and Faculty Fellow, Ash Center for Democratic Governance, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. His most recent book is Investing in Democracy: Engaging Citizens in Collaborative Governance (Brookings 2009), and he is currently working on a two-volume study, Self-Governance in American Political Development.

Jennifer Girouard is a PhD candidate in Sociology at Brandeis University.

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Varieties of Civic Innovation

Deliberative, Collaborative, Network, and Narrative Approaches

By Jennifer Girouard, Carmen Sirianni

Vanderbilt University Press

Copyright © 2014 Vanderbilt University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8265-2000-5

Contents

Introduction Jennifer Girouard and Carmen Sirianni, 1, 
1. Embedding Public Deliberation in Community Governance Elena Fagotto and Archon Fung, 7, 
2. Ways of Knowing the Los Angeles River Watershed: Getting from Engaged Participation to inclusive Deliberation Anne Taufen Wessells, 23, 
3. Civic innovation, Deliberation, and Health impact Assessment: Democratic Planning and Civic Engagement in San Francisco Jason Corburn, 45, 
4. intramovement Agenda Setting: Nationalizing North Carolina's Fight to Defeat an Anti–Gay Marriage Constitutional Amendment Daniel Kreiss and Laura Meadows, 75, 
5. Civic Communication in a Networked Society: Seattle's Emergent Ecology by Lewis A. Friedland, 92, 
6. Accounting for Diversity in Collaborative Governance: An institutional Approach to Empowerment Reforms by Caroline W. Lee, 127, 
7. Networks and Narratives in the Making of Civic Practice: Lessons from iberia Robert M. Fishman, 159, 
8. Turning Participation into Representation: innovative Policy Making for Minority Groups in Brazil Thamy Pogrebinschi, 181, 
9. Bringing the State Back in through Collaborative Governance: Emergent Mission and Practice at the US Environmental Protection Agency Carmen Sirianni, 203, 
10. A Systemic Approach to Civic Action Jane Mansbridge, 239, 
Contributors, 247, 
Index, 251, 

CHAPTER 1

Embedding Public Deliberation in Community Governance

ELENA FAGOTTO AND ARCHON FUNG

* Public deliberations, meetings where citizens collectively discuss local problems and possible solutions, are a distinctive characteristic of American political life. While America famously has a long tradition of civic participation and self-government (de Tocqueville 2004), some citizens in some communities appear to have developed habits of regularly engaging one another in public deliberations on a breadth of topics. We call this civic and democratic achievement embedded deliberation. We believe that communities with embedded public deliberation are relatively rare; in most places, public decisions and the deliberations surrounding them are left primarily, often exclusively, to elected representatives and those who staff public agencies. By contrast, when the habit of deliberation is embedded in a community's political institutions and social practices, public decisions and collective actions commonly result from processes that involve discussion and reasoning that engages ordinary citizens rather than through the exercise of authority, expertise, status, political weight, or other such forms of power.

But how does embeddedness happen? What are its dimensions? Are there characteristics that make for a more fertile environment for deliberation to flourish? In order to answer these questions, we searched for communities where regular and organized deliberation had taken root and grown. We aimed to understand how what almost always begins as a limited effort to mobilize citizens and convene them to consider a public issue or political problem can sometimes grow into a regular practice that involves many different segments of a community and spans multiple issues that bear scant relation to one another. In this chapter, we use evidence from nine case studies to identify the main characteristics of embedded deliberation and understand the role that individual initiators and institutional sponsors play in promoting public deliberation. We also examine the political and social characteristics that seem to favor embeddedness.

The notion of embedded deliberation lies at a frontier of both understanding and practice of public deliberation. Empirical scholars of deliberation have focused on whether citizens' views change following discussion, whether they become polarized, whether they learn, whether their engagement in politics and civic life increases (Fishkin 1997; Barabas 2004; Sunstein 2002; Mendelberg 2002), whether deliberation and negotiation contribute to the reduction of conflict and ease of policy implementation (Coglianese 1997; Coglianese, Beierle, and Cayford 2002). Both scholars and practitioners have examined the wide variety of designs for procedures of public deliberation and have examined choices such as whether deliberations should be open to all or only to those who are chosen by lot or through some other mechanism, whether deliberation should be "empowered" with actual decision-making authority (Arnstein 1969; Fung 2004), and so on. These remarkable accomplishments in practice and understanding mark real progress in the state of deliberative practice. Embedded deliberation, however, adds to these two threads of literature by focusing on the long-term effects of public deliberation. By examining how deliberation takes root and evolves, we are able to observe the way public and private institutions employ deliberation and respond to it, and how a more deliberative approach affects communities' and institutions' ability to address local problems.

Methodology

In order to understand the dynamics of embedded deliberation, we researched nine case studies of communities that had developed habits of deliberation. Because we wanted to learn about the conditions under which deliberation becomes socially and politically embedded, our selection of case studies was highly opportunistic. The advice of national experts on community-level deliberations guided us in our process of identifying communities where public deliberation was well-established. We singled out cases where deliberative practices had become fairly widespread and repeated over time and had led to some action around the issues. Hence, we selected mature or relatively mature cases, which enabled us to observe how deliberative practices evolved through time and to understand their embeddedness and impact over a period of several years. Within this category, we also selected for variety of topics, trying to obtain as broad a spectrum as possible of deliberative issues. Although we tried to include different deliberative models in our cases, our selection is by no means representative of the myriad of deliberative practices used in the United States. Since we were interested in cases where deliberation had become well-rooted, inevitably our choice of cases favored models that mobilize communities and institutions over time (such as study circles) or rely on local organizations to regularly promote deliberative methods (such as the National Issues Forums). Therefore, important deliberative formats that are used for specific one-time events (including, but not limited to, AmericaSpeaks-type events or Deliberative Polls) are not represented in our sample.

For each case, we conducted at least one field visit of several days and observed one or more deliberative events. In three cases, we attended trainings on the specific deliberative model used: the National Issues Forums model in West Virginia and Hawaii and the Indigenous Issues Forums model in South Dakota. We also conducted extensive semistructured interviews by phone or in person. In general, we interviewed the main promoters of public deliberation, participants, to register their reactions, as well as activists, policy makers, experts, and organizations that supported deliberation. We also examined all available documents from these sites to...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Univ of Chicago Press behalf of Vanderbilt Univ. P
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2014
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0826520006
• ISBN 13: 9780826520005
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 264
• Herausgeber: Girouard Jennifer
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Friedensallee 273; Hamburg; 22763; Deutschland