{"id":3074,"date":"2025-12-10T12:14:15","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T11:14:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/from-advisory-councils-to-deliberative-mini-publics\/"},"modified":"2026-10-29T08:59:22","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T07:59:22","slug":"from-advisory-councils-to-deliberative-mini-publics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/from-advisory-councils-to-deliberative-mini-publics\/","title":{"rendered":"From Advisory Councils to deliberative mini-publics"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\"><strong>Ernesto Ganuza<\/strong> (<strong>IPP\/CSIC<\/strong>)<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For more than fifty years, citizen participation has been a regular feature of public administration, with participatory processes of varying types and levels of ambition taking place at every territorial level. It has become something of an emblem of our time, filling democratic imaginaries with aspirations. More participation is assumed to produce better democracy because public policies will be better informed, less biased and closer to citizens (Warren, 2009). Even so, participation has always been complex. Within public administration, the mechanisms introduced require the involvement of technical staff \u2014sometimes from different management areas\u2014 and political representatives. This coordination challenges the hierarchical and siloed patterns typical of modern administration. Externally, participation formally opens decision-making spaces beyond administrative walls. This entails complex coordination among civil-society actors, economic and social stakeholders, unaffiliated citizens, experts, political representatives and public officials, once again challenging the conventional division of labour in politics.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When public authorities promote participation, they therefore face significant challenges and many questions and tensions arise within the political sphere: Who can participate? How far can participation go? What can be decided, and how? Through a consultative process or a more direct one? Deliberative mini-publics, organised around a deliberative methodology and whose participants are selected by lot, respond to this complexity in a new way that differs from earlier participatory mechanisms such as advisory councils and participatory budgeting. This is not the place to describe every difference in detail, but it is worth highlighting the innovations these processes introduce into the history of participatory mechanisms.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Advisory councils emerged in the early 1980s, bringing organised social movements into the planning of local public policies. Participation revolved around associations, which became the actors with whom public authorities coordinated beyond the administration. Despite criticism and their purely consultative nature, by volume and presence these councils remain the principal participatory mechanism used by public authorities to involve society in policymaking, not only locally but also at regional and national levels. By the late 1990s, however, advisory councils began to be criticised for their lack of social representativeness (Navarro, 1999; Font, 2001). Their inward-looking internal operation and lack of external transparency were also criticised (Sarasa and Guiu, 2001), affecting the quality of proposals, which did not adequately represent social diversity (Alguacil, 2003).<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The introduction of participatory budgeting from 2001 onwards across Spain \u2014and elsewhere in Europe\u2014, with important experiences in Andalusia, Catalonia and Madrid (Ganuza and Franc\u00e9s, 2012), was justified by the weaknesses of advisory councils. It introduced two distinguishing features. First, participation was opened to the entire population, inviting people who did not belong to organisations to help shape public policy. Second, it created a direct decision-making process for a small part of the public budget, strengthening the outward turn of public administration by opening policy definition to people\u2019s direct views.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The new participatory process created significant challenges. First, public authorities had to establish coordination mechanisms with the population as a whole. This required new participatory tools, such as open public assemblies, and more accessible language in communication. Second, internal coordination was necessary. Unlike councils, which addressed a specific thematic area outside direct decision-making, participatory budgeting required coordinated action within the administration because citizens\u2019 proposals invariably affected several management areas \u2014participation, infrastructure, finance, the mayor\u2019s or president\u2019s office and others\u2014, overflowing the siloed way in which public administration traditionally operates.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Participatory budgeting remains widespread in Catalonia and Spain. However, it has been criticised for the biased profile of participants. People could voluntarily attend open assemblies to submit proposals or vote. Although this significantly increased participation compared with advisory councils, participants could not claim to represent the territory as a whole. Moreover, the process encouraged unaffiliated citizens to compete for proposals closely linked to their neighbourhoods and immediate needs. This was repeatedly used to question the quality of proposals, which were seen as reflecting personal interests rather than the common good.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Despite the criticism, public authorities consistently justified participatory mechanisms by their ability to draw on participants\u2019 experiential knowledge. The purpose was not merely to give people a leading role: they also knew their surroundings better, and their participation added significant value to policymaking without conflicting with broader public policies. This helped overcome many criticisms and sustained political support for participation over time. To understand the new family of participatory mechanisms \u2014deliberative mini-publics\u2014, it is useful to consider what they add from this perspective. One of their major innovations is to value another kind of knowledge, related more to planning than to immediate use. Mini-publics invite citizens to discuss long-term problems that extend beyond participants\u2019 immediate experience. The conditions and requirements of this form of participation change the way public authorities usually approach participatory processes.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In general terms, deliberative mechanisms are partly justified by the weaknesses of earlier participatory processes: the biased profile of participants and the limited quality of proposals, which were often focused on small, personal issues that were difficult to generalise or scale. Through civic lottery, deliberative mechanisms obtain a descriptive sample of a territory\u2019s population. Sociological techniques are used to assemble a group reflecting the population\u2019s diversity and avoid bias in participant profiles. Participants are not invited to express personal preferences or only their experiential knowledge, but to reflect strategically on the advantages and disadvantages of a political dilemma and formulate a specific public recommendation affecting the whole population. To achieve this, deliberative processes explicitly provide participants with information and learning about the issue so their proposals are grounded in prior evidence. Together, a descriptive sample and participants\u2019 strategic knowledge allow deliberative mechanisms to address long-term questions with territorial impact, unlike earlier participation focused mainly on immediate problems of use.<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">We can identify four new dimensions that distinguish the implementation of a deliberative mini-public from earlier participatory mechanisms.<\/p>\n\n<ol class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>Deliberation creates a different challenge for internal coordination within public administration, at both political and administrative levels. As with participatory budgeting, a mini-public requires different departments to coordinate and align their intentions and practices. The presentation of the issues under discussion and their implications must also be coordinated, because deliberative methodology seeks to plan public policy in response to a dilemma. This requires working with experts inside and outside the administration and, above all, with political representatives to define the context and boundaries of the debate. The dilemma must be developed jointly so the administration can respond to participants\u2019 final recommendations. Political and technical leaders therefore need to adopt a different working dynamic and make a stronger political and administrative commitment.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Participants in deliberative mini-publics are selected by lot. The purpose is to invite them to deliberate on strategic issues rather than only on their immediate reality, which changes the participatory dynamic. For example, small-group work and other deliberative formats must be introduced so citizens can reflect on and discuss the dilemma. This requires a significant renewal of the participatory methods traditionally used within public administration.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Recommendations set out participants\u2019 reasons for choosing one public policy over another, based on the information received and their deliberation. This creates another challenge for public administration: unlike participatory budgeting, it is not a decision-making process about minor issues, but often concerns strategic policies requiring determined executive action over the medium and long term. Processes are needed to select experts who can provide information and enable participants to engage in well-founded reflection.<\/li>\n\n\n\n<li>Moreover, working with a descriptive sample always means working with a small number of participants. More than ever, it is therefore necessary to consider how the deliberative mechanism connects with the rest of the population.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">[Published in Digital CSIC]<\/p>\n\n<p class=\"has-small-font-size wp-block-paragraph\">Image: Debagoiena Citizens\u2019 Assembly, published in Noticias de Gipuzkoa, November 2025.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ernesto Ganuza (IPP\/CSIC) For more than fifty years, citizen participation has been a regular feature of public administration, with participatory processes of varying types and levels of ambition taking place at every territorial level. It has become something of an emblem of our time, filling democratic imaginaries with aspirations. More participation is assumed to produce [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3075,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"acf":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":["https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/noticias-de-gipuzkoa_argitzen_mesa.jpg",1200,675,false],"thumbnail":["https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/noticias-de-gipuzkoa_argitzen_mesa.jpg",128,72,false],"medium":["https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/noticias-de-gipuzkoa_argitzen_mesa.jpg",1200,675,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/noticias-de-gipuzkoa_argitzen_mesa-768x432.jpg",768,432,true],"large":["https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/noticias-de-gipuzkoa_argitzen_mesa.jpg",1200,675,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/noticias-de-gipuzkoa_argitzen_mesa.jpg",1200,675,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/noticias-de-gipuzkoa_argitzen_mesa.jpg",1200,675,false]},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"yago","author_link":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/author\/yago\/"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"Ernesto Ganuza (IPP\/CSIC) For more than fifty years, citizen participation has been a regular feature of public administration, with participatory processes of varying types and levels of ambition taking place at every territorial level. It has become something of an emblem of our time, filling democratic imaginaries with aspirations. More participation is assumed to produce&hellip;","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3074","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3074"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3555,"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3074\/revisions\/3555"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3075"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deliberativa.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}