The Innovation in Democracy Programme (IiDP) have published an exciting new set of resources from the project, which completed its activities last year.
IiDP was commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to trial deliberative democratic methods as a way of involving citizens in local government decision-making. It supported three local authorities (Cambridge, Test Valley and Dudley) to involve residents in tackling a local issue through a citizens’ assembly. The programme was run in partnership with Involve, DemSoc, the RSA and MySociety and led by CCUKD Advisory Board member Miriam Levin at DCMS.
They have produced a handbook for running local citizens’ assemblies based on insights from the programme alongside a case studies document with responses from the council staff that led each assembly. There is also an independent evaluation document and a brilliant short film documenting the experience of participants in the assemblies. All in all, an important suite of new resources that will be extremely helpful for practitioners and will hopefully encourage more local authorities to run deliberative processes in the future.