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I’m with more than 140 scholars, practitioners, and activists from as far away as India, Ukraine, and Israel at Frontiers of Democracy 2014. We are streaming some of the conference live, but another good way to check in on the conversation is to follow the Twitter hashtag #demfront. So far, I’ve hear lots of tough, passionate, and thoughtful conversation about whether the small-scale democratic practices that we create–practices marked by deliberative and relational values–have anything to do with the large-scale structures that dominate our lives. One way that they might relate is by actually shoring up existing institutions, at the expense of justice. But can we critically assess powerful structures in a way that gives us agency? If this conference became a critical seminar on global crony capitalism, would we do anything differently after we left?
Peter,
Your questions about how the conference could shape us as individual actors/organizations, and how it (we) could shape a civic renewal movement have been on my mind a lot since leaving Boston. One idea that came up when we were discussing David Kahane’s work in Alberta was the idea of convening large scale deliberations without government cooperation and then using community organizing/advocacy tactics to get the government/public to take the deliberations (and its resulting policy proposals) seriously.
It would be interesting to get a sense of how interested the D&D community is in advocating on behalf of deliberations and the outcomes of deliberations — while remaining neutral on the issues themselves. I don’t know how this idea fits into a broader “civic renewal” movement, but I sense that it could help to bridge a gap between issue advocates (particularly those who are convinced that the vast majority of citizens/residents are on their side) and folks who are focused on deliberative processes and expanding access to government involvement.
Thank you for organizing the conference — hopefully we will all be able to move the ball in some small way before convening again next year.
Hi Scot, Some of the deliberation efforts are bottom up and involve a strategy to entice/pressure the powerful to take them seriously. AmericaSPEAKS was especially strong on that dimension but had to close up shop this year. I believe in that strategy, generally.
Thanks for attending; great to see you, as always.