Ordinary people, real power: can democracy be more democratic?

In 2022, 40 Aucklanders met over five weekends to make a huge decision – how to provide enough drinking water for our biggest city for the next 20 years.

These 40 people weren’t engineers or hydrologists, planners or even environmentalists. They were a bunch of randomly-selected non-experts: young and old, different nationalities and from all walks of life. And they were there to learn, to deliberate, and finally make recommendations – to the experts.

This was New Zealand’s first official ‘Citizens' Assembly’, although the concept - and the way the participants were chosen – dates back to the Ecclesia, the general assembly of ancient Athens, 2500 years ago.

And, spoiler alert, the process worked.

Watercare, Auckland’s 100 percent council-owned water company, has already commissioned a pilot plant to produce drinking water from the group’s preferred option – recycled waste water.

Still, when you first hear about random people being entrusted with gnarly political and social decisions, it does sound a bit bonkers.

Chris Allen, head of strategic planning for Watercare, Auckland’s water supplier, admits he was pretty sceptical when he first heard about the idea.

“I did think it was a bit crazy, because it's taken me 20 years to get to where I am to understand the problem, and I found it difficult to believe that in a much, much shorter period of time, lay people would be able to distill the complications of the work and come up with a solution everybody could live with.”

But as he sat and watched, they did just that.

“It was amazing how quickly they changed from understanding almost nothing to discussing complicated concepts and being quite comfortable talking with each other and with the experts. And much as I hate to say it, they were able to refute and challenge some of the comments the experts were throwing out there.”

But why do it at all?

Allen says there’s benefit from a potentially controversial recommendation (making drinking water out of water which might have come from your toilet) coming from a Citizens' Assembly, not from the company: credibility.

“As experts, often we will look at all the information, assimilate it, and come up with what we think is the best option for the community. And then we go to the community and say, ‘This is what we've done’, and they will say, ‘Well, how do we know that what you've done was the right thing? We haven't seen any of the background. You're just telling us that that's the right thing. Why should we believe you?’“

The Citizens' Assembly gave us the mandate to explore, seriously explore, how purified recycled water fits into the water sources available for the Auckland region.”

Globally over recent years, Citizens' Assemblies have been used for even more grunty topics – ones the politicians find it hard to touch: abortion reform, for example (Ireland in 2016-2017), and climate change mitigation (France in 2019). 

The University of Auckland’s Matheson Russell, an associate professor in social and political philosophy, and an expert in new models of citizen-led policymaking, says lay people, regardless of their levels of education and knowledge, are pretty good at making complex decisions – if they are given the chance.

“We typically don't find ourselves in the settings where we're asked to do that kind of work. So if we're asked to vote in a referendum or an election, we don't always have the resources we need in order to make an informed decision. With an election [or a referendum] we know three million other people are also voting, so our vote is not going to count for very much. So there aren't strong incentives to do our homework. 

“Whereas, if you're in a Citizens' Assembly, you're one of several dozen, maybe 50 to 100, people. You know your contribution matters, and you have the time and the space and the resources to do that job well. And people do.”

Citizens' Assemblies are part of a movement which has come to be known as ‘deliberative democracy’ – where small numbers of people ‘deliberate’ and come up with a painstakingly considered decision. Jury trials are the best-known example.

But of course deliberative democracy has been happening right here in Aotearoa – and among indigenous people in other parts of the world – for hundreds, if not thousands of years, as Margaret Mutu (Ngāti Kahu, Te Rarawa and Ngāti Whātua), Professor of Māori studies at the University of Auckland, knows all too well.

“Māori decision making is determined by our legal system and our legal system is tikanga, and tikanga is about getting things right. So if there is any issue you must involve everybody who has an interest.

“So you call them all together, usually on a marae, and you make sure everybody has all the information that you have been able to collect so far, and that everybody has a say who needs to. And once you’ve collected everything you sit down and make a decision.”

It can be slow process, and it’s one that often drives Pākehā crazy, she says.

“You just keep talking and keep talking because what you are always aiming for is a decision by consensus. Once you’ve got that it becomes a decision of the people - literally of the people.”

Mutu is familiar with both tikanga and the Pākehā democratic systems – her mum was Scottish, her dad Māori. But increasingly her research and her experience are leading her to question the Western, representative democratic model.

“In terms of tikanga, the parliamentary system makes no sense at all because the people who are supposed to look after the wellbeing of this country spend their whole time fighting each other, instead of sitting down and trying to work out what is the best for everybody.”

Dr Tatjana Buklijas, a senior research fellow at the University of Auckland and the foremost expert on Citizens' Assemblies in New Zealand, agrees representative democracy often doesn’t achieve vital change when it needs to. Climate change mitigation is a perfect example. 

There’s a temptation for some, she says, to think enlightened authoritarian governments might be a better solution. But that’s totally wrong, she says.

“I think the answer of everybody who is in deliberative democracy is that we need more democracy, not less, but we may need a different kind of democracy.”