What are the deliberative standards for decision making?

Deliberative public engagement brings a group of people together - through structured dialogue and debate - to learn about an issue, weigh different perspectives and trade-offs, and come to a shared way forward that informs better decision making. At its heart, deliberation is ultimately a convergent process: participants move from individual starting positions towards a collective view, set of recommendations, or agreed actions.¹

Citizens’ Assemblies in the UK already have an established set of standards - but deliberative practice is changing fast, with growing diversity in processes run at different scales, by different actors, using new technologies. Beyond Citizens’ Assemblies, the sector doesn’t yet have a formally agreed set of standards. Members of the UK’s deliberative democracy sector have collaborated to close this gap, developing these standards for deliberative engagement for decision-making that apply across diverse and innovative deliberative engagement for decision-making, building on existing frameworks including Involve’s Deliberative Principles, Sciencewise’s Guiding Principles and Quality Framework, OECD Best Practice Principles and IAP2 Values.

These standards exist to uphold the integrity of deliberation and protect what’s distinctive and impactful about it. They codify practice the sector already broadly shares, brought together and made explicit. They’re not imposing a template from outside or prescribing particular methods or technologies, but seek to provide guardrails and illustrate best practice whether a process is in-person, online, hybrid, AI-assisted, or an entirely new form. The goal is creativity and innovation within a framework that protects what sets deliberation apart from other forms of engagement.

This framework represents the sector’s collective good practice, and focuses specifically on deliberative engagement for decision-making - processes such as citizens’ assemblies, juries and panels, where a group is recruited to deliberate on a question, whether to reflect the wider population or because its members bring direct experience of the issue at hand. While these standards have been designed for deliberation used for decision-making commissioned by an institution with the power to act on the recommendations, many of these standards will also apply and be useful for other types of processes such as self-governed or community-led processes.

What this framework is not for

To keep ‘deliberative engagement’ meaningful, it excludes:

Deliberative research, polling or consultation - work using deliberative methods purely for research or consultative purposes, without transparency requirements, public evaluation, or power sharing.
Learning for democracy and popular education - community conversations, civic education and democratic education work.
Public dialogue - surfacing and mapping different perspectives or lines of disagreement without moving towards a shared conclusion; this may form a stage within deliberative engagement.

These are all valuable in their own right but serve different purposes and don’t require the same decision-linking infrastructure these standards set out.

A note on power

Process is never neutral. Who sets the question, who participates, whose knowledge counts, and who benefits are fundamentally questions of power. This tool can help ensure a process is well-designed, but it can’t guarantee it’s just. We’re committed to ongoing reflection on this tension, and to governance that keeps the framework accountable to those it’s meant to serve - not just those who commission and deliver deliberation.

This is a living document: we commit to revisiting and revising it annually as evidence emerges, new contexts arise, and the sector learns. We list the contributors to these standards for transparency.

See this Involve resource. ↩︎