Citizens’ assemblies bring together people from all walks of life – selected randomly, but to be demographically representative – to consider a public issue in depth over multiple days and meetings.
Assembly members hear evidence, question witnesses and deliberate with one another, before reaching recommendations on what they think should be done. Citizens’ assemblies put the trade-offs faced by decision-makers in front of members of the public and ask them to arrive at workable recommendations.
There has been growing interest in citizens' assemblies – and other models of deliberative democracy – in the UK over the past few years. This resource gives some guidance on how to establish a citizens' assembly. It is based on our own experience of running a large number of citizens' assemblies in the UK, on a variety of topics from climate change to hate crime, and social care to the future of town centres.
When do use the citizens' assembly method?
Not all assemblies of citizens are citizens’ assemblies – and neither do they need to be. There is a vast toolbox of public participation methodologies that can be used to involve people in decision-making in a variety of ways.
While it’s important that standards do not curb innovation, it’s critical that methods are not watered down beyond recognition. A citizens’ assembly is a specific democratic tool to be used in specific circumstances. Their power comes from their robust process, which gives a representative group of the public time and support to engage with a topic in depth. But this process makes them time and resource-intensive compared to many other methods of engagement, so citizens’ assemblies should be reserved for the really knotty issues that require challenging trade-offs to be made.
Where these circumstances exist, a citizens’ assembly can make a substantial contribution to helping to resolve an issue — but it must be properly resourced and well run to enable it to succeed.
It's with this in mind that we developed some draft standards for the citizens’ assemblies that we design and run. These are based on our own practice, understanding of the international practice and a range of standards that have already been developed across the globe (including by us). They are intended as a starting point for discussion with other practitioners, experts and commissioners to refine them over the coming weeks and months. We hope that they might form the basis for some collectively agreed standards among practitioners and commissioners in the UK.
Standards for citizens' assemblies
The standards below are organised into 'essential' and 'desirable' features of ten criteria:
- Clear purpose
- Sufficient time
- Representative
- Inclusive
- Independent
- Open
- Generative learning
- Structured deliberation
- Collective decision-making
- Evaluated
We consider the essential features to be the fundamental things that make a citizens’ assembly a citizens’ assembly. The absence of any one of these features would require detailed justification and would only be warranted in exceptional circumstances. The desirable criteria are the additional features that we consider to be current good practice.