Designing Deliberation: Three Ethnographic Challenges

There have been increasing calls to implement deliberative democratic processes or minipublics to deepen citizen participation in policymaking. Advocates argue that these forums’ design features of (1) inclusion via random selection, (2) open-minded deliberation, and (3) consequential recommendations are critical in revitalising democracy today. This presentation critically interrogates these processes’ core design features based on autoethnographic fieldwork on deliberative forums in conflict zones in the Philippines. It poses three ethnographic challenges on the ethics and politics of implementing these design features in contexts defined by fear, emotional trauma, and micropolitics of everyday life. By posing these challenges, this presentation aims to pluralise what it means to conduct ‘good’ deliberation based on normative theory grounded on ethnography.