A Culture of Deliberation: Experiments in Performance and Environmental Policy

There is growing public interest around the role of deliberative democracy within environmental governance. A key demand of Extinction Rebellion has been to establish Citizens’ Assemblies tasked with finding policy solutions to the climate crisis. This demand has had significant traction within national political parties (eg. Labour, SNP and the Green Party), and local councils around the country. In this paper, we explore how the success of these kinds of initiatives must sit within a broader culture of deliberation and active citizenship. As a potential starting point for this, we draw upon empirical research on participatory theatre practice as a unique new platform for political deliberation. We argue these spaces provide a prefigurative insight into what a deliberative culture could look like: hosting crucial political conversations in imaginative, playful and inclusive ways that emerge from the bottom up rather than the top down. We explore the ways in which this challenges, but also complements more traditional and formal approaches to deliberative democracy at a time of particular policy relevance.