The art of deliberation? An alternative methodology for creative and deliberative conversations

While popular political deliberation is widely agreed to be of normative value, in practice citizen deliberation events are often organised in a top-down way, typically focusing on pre-determined issues, relying on a didactic style of information provision and the formal rationalisation of arguments and entailing. This stylistic choice can narrow the scope of the issues under discussion, raise barriers to entry for participation, and may serve to narrow the horizons of popular deliberation. In this paper, we outline the findings of a pilot project that sought to develop an alternative approach to deliberation, one which was co-designed and delivered with creative practitioners and which involved a variety of creative practices as a means of starting new deliberative conversations. The substantive focus of these conversations was on Wales's constitutional future, but our analysis here explores i) how a co-production approach can bring innovation and alternative practices into the design of deliberative processes; ii) how creative practices (such as poetry, sewing and collage-making) can open up new spaces of inclusivity and diversity in deliberative conversations; iii) how the role of experts in deliberation can shift to being ‘expert-participants’; and iv) the extent to which a model for creative and deliberative conversations can be ‘portable’ – adapted to and implemented in a variety of contexts and spaces, in order to enable deliberation that is sensitive to the needs and priorities of participants. Whilst the paper is first and foremost and empirical analysis of an innovative form of creative democratic participation, the findings point to the potential for alternative methodologies – that are creative, flexible and designed from the bottom-up - for achieving high quality deliberation. In this way, the paper contributes insights into the potential of an assemblage frame for analysing and evaluating participatory and deliberative processes.