DemocracyNext

DemocracyNext is an international research and action institute dedicated to scaling high quality, empowered, and permanent citizens’ assemblies. Our programmes aim to achieve this through building or creating new infrastructure, institutions, innovation, impactful storytelling, and systemic change.

Across the globe, people lack agency to shape their destinies. Governance systems are failing to address hard, complex issues. And those in power are not accountable to their citizens. We want to change this.

At DemocracyNext, we believe in a more just, joyful, and collaborative future, where everyone has meaningful power to shape their societies. We work to shift who has power and how we take decisions in government and in institutions of daily life like workplaces, schools, and museums.

Citizens’ assemblies are brave spaces for creative problem solving, designed for exercising our collective intelligence, engaging with complexity, and finding common ground.

At their heart are three key ideas – sortition (selecting decision makers by lottery), deliberation (collectively weighing evidence for shared decisions), and rotation (taking turns representing, and being represented by others).

Our hypothesis is that if people have greater agency in decision making, the ripple effects contribute to a thriving, resilient society of active citizens, where people have stronger trust in one another, a meaningful sense of belonging, and are less polarised. Citizens’ assemblies lead to more legitimate and informed decisions, policies, and resource allocations.

Our three focus areas are democratic infrastructure, institutions, and innovations:

1. Infrastructure - Building the field: We serve as a connector of knowledge and people to help the field of democratic innovation to grow and thrive. We collect data and good practices, create resources - including our seminal 'how to' guideAssembling an Assembly, frameworks, and guidelines, and we convene networks. We work to seed and strengthen the democratic infrastructure necessary for sustainable change, scaling the number of people and organisations with the know-how to implement and facilitate deliberative assemblies through our learning programmes and capacity building activities. 
2. Institutions - Scaling systemic change: We provide technical advice and expertise on the design of institutionalised Assemblies that are more than one-offs and provide support for the relational and political work to ensure change is sustainable. To us, Citizens’ Assemblies are not just ‘tools’ that should complement elections. Our work is about building new institutions. We think the architecture of democracy needs to expand to include Assemblies with real weight and power. We want to see empowered, decision-making Assemblies next. 
3. Innovations - Enabling experimentation: While we have evidence of ‘what works’, there are still many unanswered research questions and many innovations to be tried and tested. We are prototyping tech-enhanced deliberative assemblies. We are exploring more-than-human governance approaches. And we are expanding the core ideas of Citizens’ Assemblies into other domains beyond government. 

About DemocracyNext

DemNext was founded in 2022 by CEO Claudia Chwalisz. Our small core internationally-based team has senior level backgrounds in deliberative democracy, research, architecture and landscape design, communications and campaigning, arts, heritage and operations. We are supported by our International Advisory Council which includes leading scholars and experts.

Our team is at the forefront of international research and design of Citizens’ Assemblies and other deliberative processes. Prior to founding DemocracyNext, Claudia Chwalisz was involved in designing the world’s first permanent Assemblies anchored in law in Ostbelgien, Paris, and Brussels. She established the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation and co-authored with DemocracyNext’s Founding Head of Research and Learning, Ieva Česnulaitytė, the OECD’s flagship studies analysing 700 examples across the globe, establishing international standards of good practice, evaluation guidelines, and field-leading studies on institutionalising deliberative democracy. Claudia and Ieva co-ordinated the OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Network, edited the OECD blog Participo, advised on institutionalising deliberative democracy in the Basque Country in collaboration with Arantzazulab, managed five pilot projects of citizen participation in cohesion policy supported by the European Commission, and they designed deliberative processes in Finland and Lebanon.

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