The Deliberative Democracy Handbook is the first book to bring together the best practices and thinking on citizen participation processes. Citizen participation is both the heart of democracy and a mandatory part of many public decisions. Deliberative democracy is the nationwide movement to make citizen participation meaningful and effective.

Most citizen participation events fail to truly engage citizens and affect decisions. The Deliberative Democracy Handbook helps readers figure out which method of engagement is right for them and guides them through using the appropriate method. A top flight collection of experts critiques a wide range of deliberative practices to improve readers understanding of the best ways to bring citizens together to engage in thoughtful, respectful discussion of complex public issues.

The idea of public deliberation has come in and out of vogue over the past century, and its recent arrival is no guarantee that it is here to stay. A deliberative movement appeared in the early 20th century in the United States, only to dissipate by World War II. The reemergence of deliberation in the 1990s could also come to an end, and this chapter explains what cultural, technological, and geo-political forces bring about deliberation and cause its collapse. Understandi

This chapter provides a general survey of a wide range of practical efforts to foster more citizen deliberation in American politics. Deliberative programs differ in terms of who is included in these forums, how deliberation is conducted, and how success is determined. A useful theory of deliberative democracy must engage the realities and constraints of deliberative practice, and public deliberation programs need to recognize the theoretical andcultural consequences of the practical choices they make. Deliberation may have a number of positive outcomes, but it is more important to understand

The National Issues Forums is a grassroots movement of diverse organizations and individuals committed to framing, moderating, and convening inclusive public discussions. Organizations across the country use nationally-developed discussion guides, often adapting these guides to reflect the circumstances of their local community. A growing number of communities are applying the theoretical principles of the Forums to name and frame their own local issues for public deliberation.

How can a local newspaper work with the public to inform its judgment about which candidate to endorse in an election? How can mutual trust be built among the public and the press to arrive at such a conclusion? This chapter will document a major metropolitan newspaper's endeavor to engage citizens in a city-wide civic journalism project. How did it happen? What were the outcomes? Charles, Sokoloff and Satullo discuss their best practices and principles for weaving civic mapping, public deliberation and the business of running a newspaper into a positive electoral experience for citizens.

Jim Fishkin introduced the world to the Deliberative Poll in the late 1980s. Since then, Fishkin and his colleagues have overseen dozens of such polls, which invite a random sample of a large public to engage in face to face deliberation. Participants receive balanced background information, discuss the issues in structured and moderated small groups, and question a panel of experts representing a range of viewpoints. They complete a survey both before and after they deliberate. Farrar and Fishkin explain the distinctive design and virtues of this approach to public consultation, and discuss h

Public deliberation can extend well beyond the most active and expert members of a community. This chapter reviews two closely-related models, planning cells and consensus conferences, which specifically aim to include lay citizens in policy deliberations. Both models are highly structured deliberative procedures that emerged in Europe in the 1970s and 80s. They provide spaces where the "politically unorganized" can come together to develop an informed and considered public voice on issues of social relevance. Hendriks compares and contrasts the features of each model and discusses European as

For three decades, Citizen Juries have been used effectively to examine a wide range of public policies at the local, state, and national level. This chapter reviews the variety of methods by which a jury is convened, with the goal of delivering high quality citizen input that is cost-effective. The Citizens Jury process is unique for the work that has been done to bring clear, trustworthy information to voters at election time. Major future uses lie in the area of electoral reform.

[A Citizens Jury will be held in Perth, Australia in June 2005. For more information, contact Ned Crosby at b

Since the 1970s, Australia has experimented with many deliberative designs in local, state or national settings. Australians have also adapted or combined deliberative processes in quite novel ways. This chapter canvasses some of the interesting adaptations including a combined citizens' jury and televote; modifications to the consensus conference and the deliberative poll; and innovative use of the 21st Century town meeting. The adaptations have been designed to deal with the challenges posed by geography, time constraints and budgets without losing the strengths of each method.

Government entities are beginning to use online dialogue for public discussions of proposed policies. Examples from the US EPA and a California legislative committee illustrate this process. Unlike other public involvement mechanisms, online dialogue allows participants to access detailed information and take part at any time; even with large groups, dialogues allow direct communication with policy makers, encourage seeing others as individuals, not adversaries, and foster a "let's talk" attitude instead of a "time's up" one as in a traditional public hearing.

Since 1997, AmericaSpeaks has orchestrated more than 40 large-scale public forums across the nation, called 21st Century Town MeetingsT. This chapter describes how a 21st Century Town Meeting influences policy-making by engaging as many as 5,000 people at a time in deliberation about critical policy issues. AmericaSpeaks' approach, which integrates authentic deliberation with the latest technology, has been used to address a wide array of high-profile public issues, inclu

In the Western United States, federal agencies often find themselves entangled in drawn-out conflicts with local communities and interest groups over the stewardship of local public lands. In many cases, these conflicts are artifacts of agency planning processes that favor highly technical analyses over meaningful civic engagement. In a break from traditional planning approaches, the Forest Service in western Colorado has adapted the Collaborative Learning approach to enable the local citizens to deliberate about the future of the public lands. This chapter focuses on how the Forest Service used a place-based, Landscape Working Group approach to develop a forest plan for the three million acre Grand Mesa, Uncompahgre and Gunnison Forest.

Brazil leads the world in establishing local councils through legislation to enable ordinary citizens to partake in the formulation and monitoring of public policies, such as health, education, social assistance, child and adolescent. In this context, the notion of citizen participation raises two critical challenges: building institutions that allow poor and marginalized citizens to influence policies, and ensuring that these institutions are accountable to their needs. The experiences and achievements of the Municipal Health Council of São Paulo are the subject of our analysis, which brings

Beginning in January 2003, more than 800 residents of Philadelphia participated in three months of robust public dialogue about the future of the city's waterfront at Penn's Landing. They participated in a series of facilitated public meetings, including expert presentations and deliberative forums, to discuss and share their thoughts about the redevelopment of the waterfront and the city's future. This chapter presents a model process for engaging the public on issues of urban design and empowering residents to inform their elected officials on issues that affect the quality of their built environment.

Since its establishment in 1989, the Study Circles Resource Center in 1989 has helped make face-to-face deliberation a regular part of public life. In the United States, study circles have played a leading role in connecting deliberation to all kinds of change-individual, community, institutional, and policy. This chapter details the process by which study circles are conducted and provides illustrations of their many different varieties.

The mission of e-thePeople is to improve civic participation through the use of the Internet. The e-thePeople website provides a free online forum for public discussion and political action. A distinctive characteristic of the forum is the degree to which the participants themselves govern the forum, creating and enforcing the rules, deciding on the topics of discussion, framing those discussions; it's an attempt at a citizen-driven town hall. This chapter describes the methods and many successes of e-thePeople, and it examines the special challenges and opportunities of online deliberation.

While academics, politicians, and pundits wrangle over the relative power of federal, state, and local governments, a growing number of civic organizations are putting power back into the hands of ordinary citizens. In this chapter, we refer to these as "learning democracy centers." These associations and initiatives are trusted, neutral, institutionalized conveners that have the capacity to engage diverse members of their communities in solving their most pressing social, economic and environmental problems. We examine the methods by which these associations organize, deliberate, and promote

This chapter examines the specific methods of public deliberation deployed to facilitate town planning Princeton, New Jersey, but we discuss the dynamics of deliberation more broadly than this particular case. We look at specific meeting procedures designed to produce deliberation, and in doing so, we raise an issue that pertains to all methods-the importance of an open-minded, ongoing discovery of one another's values and interests, what we call "dynamic updating." We discuss the importance of this process for deliberation and what can be done to ensure that it takes place.

Dialogue and deliberation have permeated civic life in Hampton, Virginia. Working together, the government and civic organizations of Hampton have creatively and painstakingly expanded the community's capacity for effective citizen engagement on every kind of public issue. In this chapter, we explain how this change occurred by discussing the importance of Hampton's governmental structure, the city government's general efficiency, and its model for developing a collaborative community. We also provide three illustrations of how collaborative initiatives in Hampton have taken root, and we concl

This final chapter begins by briefly reviewing the most consistent and encouraging findings across the many different cases reviewed in this volume. We then move beyond self-congratulation to identify difficulties that confront those practicing of deliberation. Persistent challenges include balancing unity and disagreement, ensuring effective organization and facilitation, conducting deliberation on larger scales, and influencing decision makers. As deliberation becomes more influential, practitioners should also take care to preserve the integrity of the deliberative process. After identifying important research questions for the future, we conclude by discussing how many contexts require a period of exploratory dialogue before beginning more solution-oriented deliberation.

The Deliberative Democracy Handbook is edited by John Gastil, faculty member of the University of Washington's Department of Communication, and Peter Levine, Research Scholar at the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy in the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy. The book enjoys contributions from more than 40 scholars and practitioners in the field.