Can ordinary people solve problems that MPs can’t?

By Rebekah White

At first, it sounds like the worst way to get something done: invite 100 members of the public to spend a few weekends discussing a problem and coming up with a solution.

Worse: they have to reach consensus, addressing and resolving all objections to their proposed course of action.

Maybe this sounds impossible, or a waste of time. But this process, called deliberative democracy, has instead produced helpful solutions to difficult issues.

In New Zealand, citizens’ assemblies have ruled on the future of Auckland’s water supply, decided on what kind of public infrastructure should exist in Whangārei and Napier, and debated land-use changes in Tairāwhiti.

Deliberative democracy is most useful when applied to difficult problems, especially long-term ones, says Dr Tatjana Buklijaš, a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Arts and Education at the University of Auckland, who studies how these processes work.

Politicians elected for three-year terms aren’t necessarily incentivised to solve intergenerational problems, she says. But ordinary people are. They don’t have political capital to lose – and they’re often invested in figuring out what to do about issues such as inequality, climate change, or a lack of housing supply.

How does deliberative democracy work?

In 2022, a group of 37 Aucklanders, roughly representative of the city’s population, met over four weekends to figure out what the city’s next major water source would be.

Auckland will run low on drinking water after 2040, according to projections by Watercare, the council organisation responsible for it.

The group was given six potential options to deliberate on, with the ability to call on experts to answer their questions.

Buklijaš noticed that members of this particular assembly were initially hesitant to reveal they didn’t understand elements of each proposal.

“It took our participants a few meetings to feel confident about showing their gaps of knowledge,” she says.

“You’re among people you don’t know – you can feel quite self-conscious about saying, ‘I don’t actually understand’.”

As the strengths and weaknesses of various options were discussed, Buklijaš and her colleagues watched people’s opinions change.

One option – recycling wastewater into drinking water – had been extremely unpopular at the outset. But eventually, it was brought back to the table.

“It took the assembly a little while to get their heads around it,” says Dr Anne Bardsley, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland who also helped design and facilitate the process.

“They quickly came to understand the purity of the water. It’s so pure that you actually have to put minerals back into it.

"But they still didn’t think that Aucklanders would accept it.”

Eventually, after much deliberation about costs, environmental impacts, managing peak demand, and coping with drought, the group ended up recommending the direct recycled water option to Watercare as their top solution – plus an education programme for Aucklanders so that others could understand what the assembly had learned.

It was a bold move: no New Zealand city currently recycles its wastewater into drinking water, but this form of recycled water comprises a large part of Singapore’s water supply.

Citizens’ assemblies work because people face reality – and each other

Citizens’ assemblies effectively remove magical thinking from problem-solving: it’s not possible for participants to recommend an imaginary scenario where a problem is resolved effortlessly and for free.

They must take into account real-world constraints – and budgets.

At first, the assembly looking at Auckland’s drinking water had focused on more palatable solutions. What about rain tanks everywhere? What about desalination plants? What about recycling wastewater, but with an extra purification step where it passes through an environmental buffer?

But after deciding together which criteria they thought were most important, and hearing from a range of experts on how each option fared against those criteria, the assembly came to a group decision that purified direct recycled water was their top choice, says Bardsley.

It helped that Watercare’s engineers were on hand at the end to fact-check the group and answer questions.

Ultimately, the process fostered a new level of understanding for the challenge of running a city.

“I don’t think Watercare was particularly popular before we started that assembly,” says Bardsley, “but I think they gained a lot of respect in how they handled the process”.

Better political representation through citizens’ assemblies

Citizens’ assemblies can be a powerful social tool for fostering understanding across social strata, says Buklijaš.

“Although we all live in the same city, we don’t necessarily talk to each other.”

People tend to cluster with others of similar education and social background – and are less often members of clubs and political parties, where people might gather across such divides.

“This is where the problem with democracy starts – once we don’t meet, and we don’t talk with people who are politically different, and maybe socially different,” says Buklijaš.

But citizens’ assemblies bring people together from different socioeconomic levels, educational backgrounds or ethnic communities.

People aren’t able to simply dismiss others’ concerns: instead, they’re forced to understand each other “on quite a personal level”, says Buklijaš.

Assemblies can be more representative than members of Parliament, who are “people who tend to be wealthier and more educated and more sheltered from the effects of multiple crises”, says Buklijaš.

“Citizen’s assemblies are meant to be an approximation of a representative sample of population.

"You are likely to have a much more diverse set of experiences, and so people will bring their positionality into the discussion and deliberation.”

Are ordinary people capable of making civic decisions?

“People could look at this and say, ‘Oh, this is very well and good in theory, but it will take too long, and it will never work’,” says Buklijaš. “And people will not come up with good ideas because they’re not experts.”

In reality, ordinary people are capable problem-solvers, says Buklijaš.

Given time, they’re capable of assessing and weighing evidence: “People come up with very, very sensible ideas.”

Those ideas are also representative of the wider population. When Ireland’s citizens’ assembly recommended the state consult the public about abortion law reform, the resulting referendum reflected almost exactly the assembly’s views.

Still, Bardsley would like to make the process more open. What if the Watercare assembly had been more visible to the rest of Auckland?

“Some people will look and say, ‘Oh, that was just 40 Aucklanders. I wasn’t there,’” says Bardsley.

“What we’ve been working on is trying to make these processes a lot more transparent and visible to the wider public, so people understand what’s happening.”

Ideally, everyone knows that it’s possible to be called up to take part.

“We call it a civic lottery,” she says. “You could ‘win the lottery’ and be part of this assembly. Everyone, in theory, has a chance to participate.”

What’s the downside to deliberative democracy?

The main downside of a citizens’ assembly: the cost.

That’s why Bardsley is looking at various tools to run different versions of the same process online.

“How do we bring more people into the conversation?” she asks. “There’s an increasing number of online ‘civic tech’ tools to do just that.”

Several of Bardsley’s current projects utilise the online tool Pol.is, which asks participants to say whether they agree or disagree with a number of different statements, and add statements of their own for others to vote on.

The tool clusters the anonymous respondents into ‘opinion groups’ based on how they respond.

While this shows the issues on which the groups disagree, it also identifies those where there is common ground and can generate consensus statements or recommendations based on these points of agreement.

“This tends to highlight that we have more in common than people think,” says Bardsley.

Political polarisation may be increasing, but that’s not reflected in most people’s opinions, says Buklijaš.

“Most people will have a relatively middle-of-the-road view. They won’t be particularly extreme, even if it’s a question that can be polarising.”

Online tools allow people’s actual opinions to surface.

“Often we just make assumptions of where people are, what they think,” says Buklijaš.

The future of deliberative democracy in New Zealand

Of course, it’s not practical to make all decisions via citizens’ assembly.

“It’s easier to have people who are professional politicians to solve some problems,” says Buklijaš.

Still, it could be a wider part of public life. New Zealand’s central government has a “distinct lack of appetite” for experimenting with these forms of democracy, says Buklijaš, whereas local government has been much more open to it.

There are certainly some big questions that citizens could tackle – questions that politicians hesitate to address: how to respond to climate change, for instance, or how New Zealand funds superannuation long-term.

“It’s really giving people the opportunity to be informed,” says Bardsley. But not through just imparting information, she adds. Instead, through dialogue with their fellow citizens.

“You have to allow them to come into a conversation, discuss their values, their points of view, let them ask the questions, bring them the information – and, yeah, magic comes out of that.”

• The world is facing unprecedented environmental challenges. Planetary Solutions, an initiative of the Sustainability Hub at Waipapa Taumata Rau, University of Auckland, and Newsroom, explores these issues – and the practical ways we can all be part of the solution.