By Ieva Cesnulaityte, Policy Analyst, Open Government, OECD

Citizen-centred and citizen-led policymaking is no longer an abstract vision. Polarisation, populism, and low levels of trust in governments, have prompted academics, practitioners, politicians, and policy makers to reflect upon innovative ways of breathing new life into democratic institutions. And some of the tools being rediscovered and applied today, such as deliberation by a representative group of citizens, date back to ancient Athenian democracy.
A new OECD study shows that public authorities from all levels of government are increasingly turning to citizens to tackle complex policy problems. They are doing so by convening groups of people representing a wide cross-section of society to learn, deliberate, and develop collective recommendations. The OECD ’s Open Government team has been looking into citizens’ assemblies, juries, panels and other representative deliberative processes as ways to meet citizen demands for more open governments and more agency in shaping public decisions.
A landmark among these processes is the Irish Citizens’ Assembly (2016-2018), which involved 100 randomly selected citizens who deliberated over and provided recommendations for five important legal and policy issues, including the 8th Amendment of the Constitution on Abortion. More recently, 150 randomly selected citizens, representative of the French population, met for seven weekends over six months last year, to form the French Citizens’ Convention on Climate. They had a mandate to define a range of measures that will enable France to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 40% by 2030 (compared to 1990 levels) in a socially just and equitable way.