Austrian Civic Councils

To clarify the value of the Wise Democracy Pattern Language as a resource, we use it to consider the practice of Civic Councils in Austria.:

Civic Councils (also known as Wisdom Councils) were first innovated in the U.S. in the 1990s by consultant Jim Rough but have found their most supportive environment in Austria where dozens have been organized for over a decade, as thoroughly described here.  Their success there has led to their more recent use in Austria and Germany and interest from elsewhere. Film-Austria / Film-Germany

In the Civic Council format one or two dozen ordinary people are selected at random and brought together for a few days as a potentially wise microcosm of their larger community. They are hosted using Dynamic Facilitation, a process that helps people feel truly heard and curious about their differences. After issue briefings from a multi-stakeholder group and several experts, Council members explore a public issue in a creative manner and come up with shared insights and recommendations. Then they share their outcomes at a large public gathering that includes ordinary people, issue stakeholders and public officials. After this report-out, that larger group engages in a free-wheeling conversation using World Café methodology which mixes them up in iterative small group dialogues. The results of all that are then turned over to a multi-sector “Responder Group” made up of officials and organizations who have power and resources to implement some or all of the recommendations – including engaging government, issue stakeholders and the public – and who then report back to the public on how implementation is progressing.  (We chose this because in our view there are few public engagement initiatives that are as sophisticated and multi-faceted as this one.)

So now let’s look at it through the lens of the wise democracy pattern language and explore its strengths and weaknesses.

The Civic Council’s special strengths include (but are not limited to) the following:

Civic Councils tap the efficiencies of a microcosm by using random selection (aka sortition) to come up with a manageable group size that reflects the larger community. This approach gives that group a level of independence from special interests as well as legitimacy in the eyes of the community and public officials. Equally importantly it assures a level of diversity and multiple perspective views to enrich their conversation, a function which is also served by the engagement of both citizens and stakeholders.  During the Council’s high quality deliberations, the views of experts are on tap, not on top of the citizens’ values and experience, and Dynamic Facilitation ensures that everyone feels heard and all diversity and disturbances are used creatively to address all concerns in ways that ultimately generate shared orientation and emergent proposals to address the issue.  (Dynamic Facilitation is a form of generative interaction noted for utilizing life energy well rather than constraining it with linear process directions.) The Council’s subsequent report-out is not just a formality, but provides space for dialogue and collaboration and communal intelligence on the part of the citizens, stakeholders and public officials present.  Engaging the Responder Group then draws powerful representatives of the whole system into the conversation and implementation activities using multi-modal power.

Now let’s look at some Civic Council limitations that could be countered:

To improve the wisdom of Civic Council outcomes, the pattern language suggests that more explicit attention could be paid to facilitating big empathy, systems thinking, possibility thinking and multi-modal intelligence while engaging the distributed intelligence of the larger population as part of the process. And, while current Civic Council designs thwart major bias, more attention might be paid to providing (or helping Council members access) full spectrum information, including views from the creative fringes of society. Furthermore, regardless of the issue (since all issues influence and are influenced by sustainability factors), we should ensure the Council uses full cost accounting that puts Nature first within a deep time stewardship perspective; these are essential for real wisdom. Recommendations could and should consciously promote awareness – and engagement – of universal participation, social capital and self-organizaton that are grounded in meeting fundamental needs. All this may require experimenting with approaches that provide enough time and develop the capacitance of Council members (i.e., their tolerance of complexity and ambiguity).

Summary:

Civic Councils are vital and inspiring innovations on the way to realizing wise democracy. Yet, still, more experiments could be done to help them reach their full potential and offer their tremendous gifts. Attending to patterns like those highlighted above could usefully guide such explorations.

See also the 2022 blog post "Scaling Deliberation: Austrian's Citizen's Councils" by Rosa Zubizarreta, adapted from a Research & Development Note written by Rosa with Andy Paice and Martha Cuffy, and published by the newDemocracy Foundation in August, 2020: https://www.newdemocracy.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/RD-Note-Austria.pdf.