The All-Island Better Democracy Network is a new initiative by Involve, made up of a community of individuals and organisations from every corner of Ireland. If you are anywhere on the island and working or interested in participation, civic voice, deliberation and citizen-centred democracy, this network is for you.
Rebekah Mc Cabe, our Head of Northern Ireland, has advocated, discussed, and developed the idea and support for this network for over three years. Last week marked an in-person network day, which included a coworking event, offers and needs, a learning seminar by Nivek Thompson (listen to her podcast, Real Democracy Now here) and ended with Democracy Drinks.
If you missed out, don’t worry as the network has a series of exciting learning calls, networking events and co-working days planned for the year ahead. If you’d like to join the conversation and become a member, click here.
👇 Below are some insights from Rebekah of the day...
What does Better Democracy mean anyway?
Last week we hosted the second meeting of our new All-Island Better Democracy Network, which brings together individuals and organisations from across the island of Ireland with the common purpose of strengthening civic voice, active citizenship, and nurturing a healthier democracy.
Held in Belfast and co-hosted with the QUB Democracy Unit, this was the first in-person meeting of the Network since our launch in March. The first half of the day was for co-working and an Offers and Needs Market - a method developed by the Post Growth Institute, and facilitated by network member Kathryn Mc Cabe of the Change Agency.
Offers and Needs Market is a technique for relationship building and resource planning that goes deeper than a simple exchange of services; it is an opportunity to reflect on what kind of network we want to collectively create and how we want to work together to create it.
Networks can take a while to find their footing - they move at the speed of relationships - but understanding our motivations for joining and how we want them to feel is a great start.
Through the workshop, ideas emerged for mutual support through a community of practice, for fun and playfulness (rejecting the idea that democracy has to be serious), and thinking about democracy as a global challenge as well as a place-based one. Members also felt that the Network needs to connect with ordinary people and to provide accessible information about democracy and the right to participate in decision-making on the island of Ireland. Members would like to see a map of democracy work across the island of Ireland. Finally, there were observations about the need for trust and transparency among members of the network, and a need for more proactive and less formal communication through channels such as WhatsApp.
The Network meeting was followed by a guest seminar from Dr Nivek Thompson, who was visiting Belfast from Australia, where she has a long career in the research and practice of deliberative democracy. Nivek’s presentation spoke to the crucial question of what we mean by ‘Better Democracy’ in the first place.
Nivek talked about how we might think about democracy as a system designed to solve particular problems, and that we can evaluate models (e.g. representative, direct, deliberative) methods (e.g. referendums, citizens’ assemblies), and institutions (e.g. parliaments, legislature) of democracy by looking at how effective they are at solving those problems, in other words how well they perform their democratic functions.
Specifically, Nivek looked at deliberative mini publics to understand how well they deliver inclusiveness, collective agenda-setting, collective will formation, collective decision-making, and accountability. We heard about four sub-national deliberative mini-publics that took place in Australia, and how we can learn from their set up to design democratic innovations so that they contribute to the quality of democracy.
These are crucial questions for us and we’ll be building on them when we meet again in August. This time, we’re heading to Dublin, generously hosted by Codema in their offices in Temple Bar. It’ll be an engaging and interactive afternoon of democracy work, starting with a network meeting on ways of working, followed by a workshop on how to DIY a citizens’ assembly. You can find details and reserve your place at either or both here.
