Facilitation or moderation of deliberative events is indispensible to deliberative practice, yet largely absent from deliberative theory - a ‘black box’, so to speak. Deliberative theory values the removal of obstacles to the ''unforced force'' of the better argument. The role of actively producing - constituting, initiating and guiding - the deliberative process, and constraining or limiting it under the pressure of time and the need for decision, would appear to be to some extent an offence to this ideal. Yet such actitivity is recognised by practitioners as essential, indeed, constitutive, of good deliberation, not least because it is considered vital for bringing excluded actors into public forums on complex issues. This paper will draw on STS analyses of public consultations in order to theorize the role of the facilitator in deliberative democratic practices. I will argue in this paper that perspectives from science and technology studies (STS) can usefully direct our attention to the productive role of the facilitator in deliberation and give us ways to analyse the interrelation between actors, theories and materials that is essential to the production of deliberation. Many STS accounts treat facilitation as a reincarnation of an elitist politics of expertise in the new guise of expert ‘discourse-managers’ (Rose 1999, Lezaun et al 2007, Braun et al 2010). While these criticisms go too far, they usefully articulate the difficulty of organising deliberation, and in this way STS analyses can prompt deliberative theory to develop a more positive account of facilitation.
