A New Player or a New Game? Explaining Citizens’ Assemblies in Latin America

This paper examines the recent diffusion of sortition-based citizens’ assemblies in Latin America as a democratic innovation introduced in a contested space. It shows how a format largely designed, theorised, and institutionalised in the Global North has been selectively imported into a high-poverty, high-inequality region with long-standing participatory and deliberative traditions in stark competition for political and institutional opportunity. Sortition-based citizens’ assemblies remain a fairly rare occurrence in the region. To date, only 27 of these assemblies have taken place in Latin America, the first in 2017, making the region a clear latecomer to the global “deliberative wave”. The article maps this late but rapid emergence across five countries, analysing how assemblies are designed, funded, and implemented when public budgets are tight, institutions are fragile, and political contestation is intense. It shows that these processes have so far depended almost entirely on international funding and “elite” promoters – civil society, international networks, and practitioner organisations – rather than elected authorities or public institutions, resulting in weaker institutional follow-up and lower uptake of recommendations than in many Global North cases. Against this backdrop, the paper asks how this particular format of deliberation travelled to the region, what explains its appeal in a context marked by poverty, inequality, and institutional fragility, and how it interacts with existing participatory repertoires such as participatory budgeting, local councils, and grassroots assemblies. It engages directly with debates on “parachuted” democratic innovations, examining whether citizens’ assemblies complement, displace, or crowd out long-standing communal and movement-based practices. While some actors present assemblies as transformative devices to bolster legitimacy and generate new forms of citizen engagement, others frame them as technocratic tools that recentre expertise and professionalised intermediaries at the expense of other forms of highly embedded or mass participation. Empirically, the article draws on 15+ in-depth interviews with funders, designers, and deliverers of deliberative processes, tracing the international networks, normative assumptions, and strategic calculations behind these experiments. Analytically, it speaks to the section’s core questions about democratic innovations under constraint by showing how mini-publics are adapted, depoliticised, or re-politicised when they lack strong institutional anchoring, operate with external funding, and confront entrenched inequalities. The study thus contributes to broader debates on the role and limits of deliberative mini-publics in challenging settings and to emerging discussions on the normative desirability of adopting, adapting, or “parachuting” democratic innovations into challenged democracies.