Introduction

Can democratic institutions help us to act in future-regarding ways? Many people – even committed democrats – have their doubts. Representative democracies, especially those with well-functioning bureaucracies, tend to provide their people with relatively high levels of economic prosperity and social welfare (Norris 2012). Overall, democratic systems fare better in this respect than autocratic ones, even those with high levels of state capacity. But it is not clear that democratic systems are equally good at ensuring the welfare of their people over the long term or acting with the potential interests of future others in mind.

Governments have failed to address climate change, plastics pollution, the loss of biodiversity, generational reproductions of racism and inequality, and many other long-term problems. Most countries also have huge – and growing – public debts that cannot be sustained over the long term. Furthermore, it is now apparent that no country was adequately prepared to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic, despite advance warnings from many public health experts. Even wealthy, stable democracies, such as Switzerland, often have trouble making investments in the future. Recent attempts to reform the Swiss public pension system by raising the retirement age have been rejected several times in referenda, even though it is clear that the system, as it exists, is unsustainable over the long term (Bello and Galasso 2021).

These examples seem to suggest that democracies – like other regimes – are myopic and seek to maximise short-term welfare at the expense of the future. As Alan Jacobs (2008) points out, politics is not just about the distribution of costs and benefits between people, it is also about the distribution of costs and benefits over time. But political regimes, of all types, have reasons to neglect the future in favour of the present. As the authors of the Brundtland Report state in their opening chapter: ‘We act as we do because we can get away with it: future generations do not vote; they have no political or financial power; they cannot challenge our decisions’ (World Commission on Environment and Development 1987: 8).

Introduction

As pointed out in previous chapters, the Finnish political system's capacity for future-regarding governance hinges on an advanced foresight system that includes experts and stakeholders in policymaking. Finnish citizens tend to have high levels of trust in experts and political institutions (Bäck and Kestilä-Kekkonen 2019), and this seems to be a crucial factor behind the success of Finland's elite-driven policymaking system. However, only cautious steps have been taken to make the Finnish policymaking system more participatory, and the country, more generally, seems to be lagging behind the ‘deliberative wave’ that has increased deliberative participation in other countries (OECD 2020). Against this backdrop, this chapter aims to calibrate the potential contributions of deliberative minipublics in policymaking processes on climate change in Finland.

Minipublics are small deliberative forums that consist of randomly selected participants who come together to engage in informed deliberations on specific policy issues. They are normally designed to represent the demographic or political diversity of the populations from which the participants are drawn (Setälä and Smith 2018). There are small-scale minipublics such as Citizens’ Juries and Consensus Conferences, which typically include only a few dozen participants, and large-scale minipublics such as Citizens’ Assemblies, which may include hundreds of participants. Previous studies show that participation in minipublics enhances learning (Setälä et al. 2010), understanding of different viewpoints (Luskin et al. 2014), empathy (Grönlund et al. 2017) and long-term thinking (Kulha et al. 2021). In this respect, minipublics have proved to be an effective way to involve citizens in policymaking on complex and long-term issues. However, there are many outstanding questions regarding the roles of deliberative minipublics in policymaking and the ways in which minipublics might be ‘coupled’ with other representative institutions (Hendriks 2016).

Climate change is a prime example of a future-regarding problem. In order to address climate change, policymakers must understand the future consequences of various policy options, and they must be able to forge long-term commitments among political elites, citizens and other stakeholder groups. In recent years, there has been a proliferation of deliberative minipublics on climate issues in various countries and at different levels of governance.

Introduction

The study and practice of future-regarding governance is in its infancy. Most of us are aware that our individual and collective decisions will affect the future in various ways, but our political institutions were not designed to deal with future issues or the long-term consequences of our decisions. Our political systems and practices are playing catch-up with our developing understanding of ourselves as temporal actors (i.e., beings that act both within our own times and across time when our actions have long-term consequences).

This book takes a wide view of the challenges and possibilities of future-regarding governance in democratic systems. It deals with conceptual challenges and possibilities, research methodologies and institutional design. The book also takes a deep dive into the practical politics of Finland's governmental foresight system, which is the most advanced and institutionalised system of its kind. Much of the existing literature on future-regarding governance looks at supplementary institutions that could be added to our existing democratic systems to make them more future-regarding. The scholars who have contributed to this book have tried to think more expansively about the future-regarding possibilities in our existing institutions, and how those might be leveraged on their own, or integrated with supplementary institutions, to make our democratic systems more future-regarding.

It is our hope that this book – and this concluding chapter – will inspire others to work in the challenging field of future-regarding governance. There is a lot of conceptual, methodological, practical and political work that needs to be done. In this concluding chapter, we outline some of our thoughts on the study and practice of future-regarding governance. In the next section, we identify four tensions that need to be (continually) navigated if we are going to have some chance of achieving our shared long-term objectives. In the last section of the chapter, we outline a research agenda that would help to advance the study of future-regarding governance. We invite other scholars to take on these research projects. There is more than enough work to go around.

A decade ago, it would have been impossible to imagine that a caregiver, a bus driver and a rail worker, together with 147 other ordinary citizens, could shape France's policy on climate change. Ordinary citizens have long been disparaged for their political apathy. They could not be bothered to vote or join a political party. They trust experts less, share fake news and fall for the dark charisma of populist demagogues. Why would anyone think that citizens can deliberate on the most challenging issues of our time?

And yet they did. Over six months, ordinary French citizens deliberated the nuts and bolts of climate change policies. They listened to experts, read scientific literature and formed thematic groups on agriculture, housing, transport, employment and lifestyle. They reached a consensus on making ecocide a crime, among other proposals, which are to be subject to a national referendum. Even the COVID-19 pandemic did not stop these citizens from deliberating, first online and then in socially distanced deliberations. The process was far from perfect, but it was groundbreaking.

If there is one important lesson that scholars of democratic deliberation could impart to political theory and practice, it is that the context of participation matters to the quality of participation. When citizens are given the opportunity to learn, engage with a diverse group of people and be in a space where changing one's mind is a virtue and not a vice, they are given the chance to reach a considered judgement. Decades of research on deliberative democracy demonstrate that citizens ‘are good problem solvers even if we are poor solitary truth seekers’ (Chambers, 2018: 36). The challenge, therefore, is to create a landscape of communication where people can make better decisions together.

Creating a context conducive for democratic deliberation is not an easy task. These democratic exercises require carefully designed spaces for participation, where norms of respect, inclusiveness, mutual justification and open-mindedness are fostered. In the academic literature, these democratic innovations are called ‘deliberative mini-publics’ or DMPs.

DMPs are a nebulous concept, sitting in between the catchall term ‘democratic innovations’ and more precise practices like citizens’ assemblies and deliberative polls. We therefore begin our introductory chapter by laying down our definition of DMPs and situating it within the broader political project of building a deliberative democracy. We then provide an overview of their core design features grounded in normative theory and informed by political practice.

Introduction

In her latest book, Hélène Landemore (2020) writes of ‘open democracies’ in which ordinary citizens have a more significant role in our systems of democratic representation. For her, recent examples of DMPs, such as the ambitious Icelandic experiment of 2010–13 or the French Climate Assembly, represent important steps towards a renewed democratic system in which DMPs operate side-by-side with representative institutions. In this book, we, as a collective set of authors, remain neutral on the question of where these growing instances of DMPs may be heading; each one of us may have our own views on this subject, but we have deliberately steered clear of addressing such themes in this book. Rather, our aim has been quite specific, namely, to set out the core characteristics of DMPs (the focus of Chapters Two to Six) and to examine how these mini-publics connect to the wider public (the focus of Chapters Seven and Eight).

We conclude in this chapter by addressing three themes. We first set out some minimal standards that we think are central to a well-designed DMP, drawing from the core design features set out in the previous chapters. Second, we discuss the importance of robust and independent evaluation of DMPs, particularly those that have been established by political actors. Third, we consider the implications of a global pandemic for DMPs, both in regard to how DMPs – with their emphasis on close and intense discussion – can operate, and in relation to the contribution that DMPs can make to developing responses to such significant societal challenges.

Minimal standards for a DMP

We feel it is important to set down clear minimum standards. At a time when the number of DMPs is increasing rapidly, there is an ever-increasing risk to the DMP ‘brand’ that could result from a poorly designed process. In the preceding chapters, we reviewed the core design features of a DMP. In this section, we condense this into four key features that we feel any forum claiming to be a DMP should be measured against.

Who are the participants and how are they selected?

At the heart of a DMP is the random selection of its members. There are three features that we single out here.

Introduction

The increasing popularity of DMPs raises expectations as to what these forums can achieve. A Financial Times editorial declared that ‘deliberative democracy is just what politics needs’, referring to the power of citizens’ assemblies to address political polarization (The Financial Times, 2019). A year later, an editorial in The Guardian echoed the same sentiment, calling for ‘deliberation, not confusion’ as it spotlighted the UK's first climate assembly (The Guardian, 2020). Calls for various forms of democratic innovations emerged in the early days of the pandemic as societies imagined what it would take to make the ‘new normal’ work for all.

The increasing calls for DMPs are testament to the normative force as well as empirical track record of these forums. However, we are cautious not to pitch DMPs as a panacea that can revive democracy in challenging times. In this chapter, we take the position that DMPs are best appreciated as forums in democratic systems. This means two things. First, DMPs are not an end to themselves, but one of many potential practices that fulfil particular democratic functions, like elections, representation and exit, among others (Warren, 2017). We find that DMPs are helpful in facilitating collective will formation due to these forums’ design features but less so for collectively binding decision-making due to the lack of accountability of DMPs to those affected by their recommendations. Second, appreciating DMPs as forums within democratic systems means linking democratic deliberation with other practices of participatory decision-making. In this chapter, we take a close look at two empirical examples – the Irish Citizens’ Assembly and Ostbelgien modell – to demonstrate how DMPs can be meaningfully linked to institutions of representative democracy.

While this book focuses on core design features, we find it necessary to present an extended discussion on the wider purpose of DMPs to clarify these forums’ relationship with existing institutions of representative democracy. Viewed this way, we offer a measured appreciation of the transformative power of DMPs. We recognize that DMPs are not always the best option in solving democracy's problems, and the challenge lies in determining the precise ways in which DMPs can contribute to democratic reform.

DMPs and democracy's functions

We begin our discussion by taking a step back and thinking about the problems that a political system needs to solve to count as democratic.