Assistant Professor of Ethics and Public Policy, Division of Social Sciences, Duke Kunshan University (China)
Assistant Professor of the Practice of Global Studies, Duke University
Assistant Professor of Ethics and Public Policy, Division of Social Sciences, Duke Kunshan University (China)
Assistant Professor of the Practice of Global Studies, Duke University
For more on my research, see the Published Papers and Working Papers sections as well.
Global institutions are afflicted by severe democratic deficits, while many of the major problems facing the world remain intractable. Against this backdrop, we develop a deliberative approach that puts effective, inclusive, and transformative communication at the heart of global governance. Multilateral negotiations, international organizations and regimes, governance networks, and scientific assessments can be rendered more deliberative and democratic. More thoroughgoing transformations could involve citizens' assemblies, nested forums, transnational mini-publics, crowdsourcing, and a global dissent channel. The deliberative role of global civil society is vital. We show how different institutional and civil society elements can be linked to good effect in a global deliberative system. The capacity of deliberative institutions to revise their own structures and processes means that deliberative global governance is not just a framework but also a reconstructive learning process. A deliberative approach can advance democratic legitimacy and yield progress on global problems such as climate change, violent conflict and poverty.
This book project is an effort to expand our democratic imaginaries. The guiding question is: What might a participatory polity look like, which places citizen participation, dialogue and deliberation at the heart of policymaking? We explore how direct citizen participation can feature throughout the varied stages of the public policy cascade. Drawing on case studies from around the world, we investigate how public participation can operate at multiple geographical scales – ranging from the neighborhood level all the way up to the transnational – and illustrate how participation at different levels might be linked up. We also explore ways that citizens can craft their own rules for participation; monitor those rules and the policies they help generate; and cooperatively implement their own local policies. The case studies suggest ways in which the role of experts and officials might be transformed into one of largely supporting and facilitating public participation. We consider participatory processes for public-opinion formation, agenda setting, decision-making/legislation, implementation, policy evaluation, and conflict resolution.
Two overarching questions motivate this book project: How might the participants to a nominally democratic process themselves craft decision-making processes that are “inclusive,” or, that best approximate the ideal of treating citizens or members as “free and equal”? And what role might a normative theory of the democratic process play in their actual efforts to do so? To address these questions, I juxtapose selected aspects of the literature on deliberative democracy with ideas drawn from pragmatist approaches to ethics and social inquiry.
Broadly speaking, pragmatists theorize by explicitly drawing on the resources provided by our existing practices and by making reference to the consequences they have for actual lives. I deploy pragmatist ideas to develop a normative theory of the democratic process, intended as a contribution to a public philosophy for contemporary democratic governance. In doing so, I illustrate how engaged, situated agents might invoke that theory in their diverse efforts to craft processes for collective decision-making that treat the citizens of the respective demos, or the members of the respective association, as “free and equal.”
In brief, the theory I develop is a “deliberative” one, for it asks participants to (try to) justify their expressed policy preferences. Yet, for a number of reasons, it is distinct from other deliberative conceptions — for instance, in the stress it places on inquiry of various kinds. Indeed, I argue that, ideally speaking, democracy itself ought to be conducted as a form of collective social inquiry. On this conception, the participants themselves inquire into the procedures, virtues, and cultural practices that, in some particular context, are most apt to treat citizens or members in a way that is consistent with the values that arguably justify the democratic process itself: again, “free and equal treatment.”