Canada's World – public engagement with real vision

Canada’s World was a three-year initiative created with the goal of articulating and advancing a new vision for Canada and its place in the world; this included a national deliberation that was the culmination of a year-long dialogue process. The lead up to this dialogue saw an innovative process that engaged Canadians in small-scale deliberative dialogues with randomly selected citizens, workshops, online engagement and a number of other initiatives. Unlike traditional national deliberation processes led by government, this project was funded by a number of diverse partners, including individuals, businesses, international organisations and foundations that wanted to inspire citizens to write a new story for Canada.

Distributed funding models are important in large complex processes such as this. These models are often used as a means of involving a range of actors in the design and delivery with the view to gaining access to broader networks and, ultimately, a more inclusive, bottom-up approach to dialogue. However, the autonomous nature of this type of process can mean that it is difficult for deliberations to make a substantive impact on live policy issues. When processes are more closely tied to decision-making institutions, the impact can be more concretely focused on policy. 

As such, it is important to start looking at how more innovative and upstream engagement processes, coordinated by actors outside Government, can be linked to policy-making and connect citizens to the state and policy in a more meaningful way. An interesting example is the Sciencewise-ERC Low Carbon Communities Challenge (LCCC), which has a key objective of informing policy development through community dialogue, engagement and co-inquiry.

Canada’s World is just one example of an approach adopted in another country. Sciencewise-ERC is researching international comparisons of mechanisms for engaging the public in decisions involving science and technology. This research will look at examples from right around the world, and the report will be published in September 2010.