August 2009

Public deliberation as a political ideal represents the next frontier in democracy building. Public deliberation calls for dramatic changes in how political decisions are made. Through deliberative processes, citizens and not elected representatives, make decisions on how to manage their own resources. These decisions are reached according to the exchange of reasons and arguments that appeal to shared objectives or values. Decisions resulting from deliberation are more informed and rational. Under deliberative processes, political truths emerge not from competing ideas but through dialogue between citizens. Deliberative processes produce information as a by-product, not a precondition for participation.

It’s easy to say that we need to build broad coalitions to bring about sustainable pro-poor change.  Easier said than done.   In a piece entitled “Connecting Nature’s Dots”, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman argues that

“We’re trying to deal with a whole array of integrated problems – climate change, energy, biodiversity loss, poverty alleviation and the need to grow enough food to feed the planet – separately.  The poverty fighters resent the climate-change folks; climate folks hold summits without reference to diversity; the food advocates resist the biodiversity protectors.”

Why the disconnect?  One of the reasons Friedman and his interviewees offer is that when it comes to environmental preservation, the farther humans are from experiencing nature, the harder it is for us to make the connections among environmental issues and other relevant policy and practice domains. 

A reader's response to the blog post "Shock and Awe? The Effects of Negative Framing":

In  political matters, the focus should move away from attitudes; since Robinson (1976) study investigating negative news effects, we have known that low involvement citizens (involvement with the issue) are influenced first by information or cognitive change, which produces behavioral change, which eventually produces attitudinal change. While high involvement citizens move from cognitive change to attitudinal to behavioral. The power of negative information has more to do with cultural expectations, however.  Within western democracies, research has shown that negative information is far more attention-getting than positive information.  In addition, people not only attend to the information, but they talk about the information with others, creating a spiral effect, in that when people talk about negative information with others, they may serve as influentials, bringing news to those who have not attended to the news through the mass media, or they may assist in concretizing the significance of news reports, through their discussions with others.  For this reason, negative information tends to be more suasive, and as a result, people retain the information; furthermore, because of its cued negativity, they are able to access that information far more readily than positive information.  In short, negative information saves time, money and  
effort; it is far more economical, efficient and effective than positive information, within western democracies (see Lau's considerable research).   
 

One of the objectives of CommGAP and this blog is to strengthen citizen voice in the public sphere, particularly of those who are often marginalized in public spaces.  This voice in the public sphere is important for any advocacy effort or social movement and also an essential right for every individual. As one part of the process of building this voice, participation in various decision-making and policy processes is seen as an integral part of development work. In fact, it has been a development buzzword since the late 1970s.  But sometimes participating can be a setback.