Armchair Experts with Nivek Thompson

Enhancing Democracy through the Design and Evaluation of Deliberative Mini-Publics

Part 2

Does your community engagement enhance local democracy?

This session will consider how to evaluate the effectiveness of your community engagement activities in terms of their contribution to democracy. The decline in trust and confidence in democracy concerns most of us in the community engagement field. But how can we assess whether the community engagement we are undertaking is impacting the quality of democracy?

There are multiple ways to evaluate the effectiveness of our community engagement activities. For example, do they provide feedback that helps decision-makers make better decisions? Do they give community members a sense of being heard? These questions focus on the value of particular engagement activities primarily to decision-makers, often called instrumental reasons.

Focusing on the effectiveness of community engagement regarding the quality of democracy can address both the needs of decision-makers and community members and improve trust and confidence in democracy. Democratic functions are one approach that can support the evaluation of community engagement and guide its design.

This workshop-style session will introduce participants to democratic functions (empowered inclusion, collective agenda setting, collective will formation, collective decision-making, accountability and legitimacy) and provide time to consider how these could apply to your work. This approach also allows you to mix and match different approaches to community engagement to maximise the overall contribution of your engagement activities. 

Nivek Thompson

Nivek Thompson is the founder and Executive Director of a boutique consultancy Deliberately Engaging. Deliberately Engaging provides services to government and non-government organisations, primarily in designing and recruiting participants for engagement processes. We focus particularly on recruiting mini-publics and similar bodies for short and long-term consultations.

Nivek recently completed her PhD looking at how democratic innovations could improve democracy. The title of her thesis is Deliberative mini-publics: institutional design and the quality of democracy. Whilst her research focused on a particular type of democratic innovation (citizens’ juries) the framework she developed to consider the design of these processes is applicable to other participatory initiatives.

Nivek was the lead developer for the Leading Deliberative Democracy and Doing Deliberative Democracy courses at the University of Technology Sydney and provided support to the development of the Masters level unit Co-design and Deliberative Engagement for the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance at Canberra University.

Nivek is an Associate at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy and Global Governance, University of Canberra and the Sydney Democracy Network, University of Sydney. She is a published author on democratic innovation, has worked on the OECD working party on institutionalising deliberative processes, and initiated and produced the podcast series Facilitating Public Deliberations. Nivek is also the producer and host of Real Democracy Now! A Podcast, where she interviews thought leaders in democratic innovation from around the world.

Event Details

When: Thursday 5 June 2025

Time: 12.30pm - 13.30 (Sydney time)

Where: Via Zoom | You will receive an email 1-2 days prior with the meeting ID. To ensure you receive this invitation please add no-reply@zoom.us to your trusted list of contacts.