Environmental Issue Complexity and Democratic Deliberation: Demonstrating the Limits or the Need for Innovative Systems Thinking?

While it is possible to demonstrate an inverse relationship between issue complexity and the sophistication of the conclusions drawn by deliberating citizens at a group level, this does not suggest a limit for the value of democratic innovations. It does, however, require that analysis of democratic innovations cast a wider net, to consider the broader institutional and discursive context, and the longer term impact of innovations in a deliberative system. Systemic analysis here extends beyond the networking of deliberative sites, to consider an “ecology of deliberation” where outcomes are interconnected and emergent — being a function of systemic features that themselves evolve as democratic innovation proceeds. In such light, individual innovations may present as failures, but still contribute to building deliberative capacity as well as inform good outcomes. This paper will present empirical evidence from a battery of case studies and draw on multidisciplinary systems theory to argue for a dynamic approach to thinking about democratic innovations in respect to complex environmental issues.