Welcome to the Bundesbeteiligungswerkstatt (Federal Participatory Workshop)! Or, Germany integrates the best of citizens assemblies

The above diagram is the graphic representation of a Federal Participatory Workshop (or Bundesbeteiligungswerkstatt) for the German government. This is a process whereby citizen-led initiatives can impact on the legislative process in the Bundesrepublik, and become a kind of “third chamber”, alongside the Bundestag (Federal Diet or lower house) and the Bundesrat (Federal Council or upper house). 

The full paper is here - Bundesrepublik 3.0 - from the Co-Creation Foundation. As you gaze upon the complexity above, it may help by reading their rationale for the whole exercise:

Current political and administrative practices for coping with complex challenges are no longer sufficient, and existing forms of representation, public information and debate and decision- making are no longer able to meet the growing public demand for participation.

This can be seen in complex social projects such as the energy transition, in which a variety of actors are (rightly) involved in order to achieve positive solutions for society as a whole. Political projects of this kind require broad involvement and co-responsibility - managing them successfully is dependent on the involvement of many actors.

Is it not logical that such challenges should in future be jointly identified and tackled by politicians, public authorities, the business community, scientists and civil society acting together?

Is it not logical that, in the future, objectives and normative goals on social issues should be developed in a broad, discursive, comprehensive participation process, and that on this basis concrete proposals should be brought forward for implementation?

Is it not logical that appropriate laws should then be enacted and corresponding projects implemented cooperatively and by networks involving many different actors?

Is it not obvious that the normative values and future expectations of citizens, the expertise of scientists and the drive of businesspeople could be brought together in completely different ways in order to generate viable solutions within a social consensus in the face of complex and interdependent challenges?

In such a participatory paradigm, we would not only be talking about formal government, but about the governance of society as a whole at the federal level.

At a time of declining political legitimacy through the decreasing use of conventional forms of political participation (elections and party involvement), new processes of public political information and decision-making are needed.

In dealing with the complex challenges of our time, new processes and procedures of collective governance are needed in order to be able to develop intelligent and robust solutions with the help of the knowledge of the many (diverse perspectives and competencies).

Democratic procedures are needed which are designed in such a way that sound substantive answers to open questions of the future can be develope.

At the same time, experiences of self-efficacy and resonance can be made which work to counter alienation between the wider public and politics, and to strengthen confidence in representative democracy and social cohesion.

An intelligent interweaving of representative-parliamentary, participatory and direct political elements is necessary for this purpose: the political responsibility for responding to challenges for society as a whole is thereby distributed among multiple groups of actors and the preservation of the separation of powers is ensured.

Our study argues that new participatory concepts can counteract current democratic deficits. Participation can play a mediating role between citizens and politics as well as within society, thereby countering alienation, mistrust and growing social divisions.

By incorporating and utilising diverse perspectives, competences and experiences, participation can provide a robust basis for decision-making and thus constitute an essential and ultimately resource-conserving building block of a representative democracy that is fit for the future.

Embedding political participation in our institutions, in accordance with the draft approach proposed in this study, can lead to a new version of the parliamentary-representative democracy of the Federal Republic of Germany.

It can enable an open and liberal society of the 21st century to address the changes in the world around us in an agile, innovative and sustainable way, to debate and formulate societal goals, to seek answers and to share the responsibility for finding and shaping them.

Can all these different powers and forces be integrated in such a total way - a government “workshop” processing demands from below? At least the “expectations of citizens, the expertise of scientists and the drive of businesspeople” are mooted as the start of the process.

But we are fascinated by the “civil qualification” procedure that sits between the citizens and the machinery, described elegantly as “a threshold of relevance”. The text of the report suggests this threshold could be triggered by “a quorum, similar to that for a local referendum”. Or more “differentiated procedures are also feasible in which issues would have to qualify on content criteria, e.g. through online forums”.

At A/UK, we’ve been trying to imagine how a Citizens Action Network might act to manifest civic and community power. It’s nice to imagine, in this semi-utopian German system, that the formation of a CAN around a core issue might well represent the crossing of a “relevance threshold” for the Bundesbeteiligungswerkstatt to kick into action.

We’re also cognisant of Extinction Rebellion’s core demand for citizens/people’s assemblies to be participating in national policy towards zero-carbon society - and that (nowithstanding the sclerosis of British parliamentary democracy) this might well represent an ideal plan for that relationship.

We’d recommend a thorough read of the paper. One of its virtues is that they’ve sourced their good ideas from a wide and global range of participative and deliberative experiments. This itself provides a useful tour of the horizon of recent democratic innovations. And the Cocreation Foundation itself produces excellent work - see its notes on “Co-Creation and Transformation”.