
Image credit: Voice Assembly at New Art Exchange in Nottingham - Photo by Tom Morley
David Jubb has over fifteen years of experience as Artistic Director and CEO of Battersea Arts Centre and has worked extensively in co-production projects.
In this guest blog, commissioned as part of Culture Commons’ open policy development programme on devolution and increased local decision making, David reflects on his work with Citizen’s in Power – a not for profit founded in March 2023 to promote the value of citizen-led cultural decision making.
David and the team are currently working on a large-scale citizen's assembly on culture in collaboration with Trinity Bristol, St Pauls Carnival and West of England Combined Authority.
We are all accustomed to the way that groups wield power. We navigate our lives as members of various groups, from families and social clubs to political parties and online communities. We have all experienced the influence of decision-making groups from the playground at school to the dynamics in our workplaces to the way political groups operate in town halls and parliaments across the UK.
Whether a group is appointed or democratically elected, there are three regular characteristics of the way that groups lead decision-making. The first is that hierarchy plays an important role in how decisions are made and who gets to make them. The second is that decisions tend to be debated using conflict-based discussion models with one argument winning out over others. The third is that diverse perspectives can often be side-lined during the decision-making process because they are perceived to challenge the primacy of the main group or groups.
All decision-making groups establish social norms with an expectation that group members will follow them. They can exert powerful social pressure on individuals to conform, helping to maintain the group's cohesion and control over its members. While groups exercise power by making decisions, they also wield influence through the imposition of their own social norms. Group-led decision-making, especially evident in political and corporate governance, is fraught with limitations because it often results in exclusion, lack of diversity and decisions that cater to a narrow band of interests.
Egregious examples of the negative consequences of group-led decision-making have been exposed through recent enquiries into infected blood, Covid-19, Post Office Horizon IT, Grenfell, Windrush and many others. In more mundane and everyday examples, group-led decision-making in our workplaces and social settings can stifle change and hamper new ideas from getting off the ground.
The creative and cultural sector is one of many sectors that predominantly uses group-led decision-making. There are various groups which make key decisions with varying remits. National and local governments lead cultural policy often shaped by groups of advisors, consultants, trade bodies and cultural organisations. Funding bodies create strategies shaped by staff and leadership teams working with boards of directors who decide on the distribution of investment. Organisations define their strategies and work-plans in an internal governance arrangement between Boards and their Executives.
‘the future of local cultural decision-making’ is a research and policy development programme led by Culture Commons in partnership with 30 organisations which explores how devolution of decision-making might work in the creative, cultural and heritage ecosystem. The programme is responding to a growing consensus for the “need for increased local decision making” and proposes that further devolution is “now broadly accepted as a political and policy imperative”. One of the core objectives of the programme is to explore how ‘Local Voice’ in decision-making will “deliver more equitable and sustainable growth in local communities.”
My contention is that if we continue to rely on the same model of group-led decision-making - one that is hierarchical, debate-based, and dilutes diversity - then simply including a wider range of local voices will not radically improve the chances of delivering more equitable growth. The proposal is akin to changing the cast but retaining the same script and production: the performance might vary slightly, but the storyline and structure is unlikely to change that much. It is important not just to challenge who gets to make decisions but also the mechanisms by which decisions are made. To truly harness the potential of local voices, we must also rethink the group-led decision-making process.
A transition towards citizen-led decision-making using mechanisms such as citizens’ juries and citizens’ assemblies, offers a compelling alternative. This is a model in which citizens are people who live, work or stay in a place, i.e. everyone. The approach is persuasive because it promises not just a change in the decision-makers, but a fundamental transformation in how decisions are made. Rather than hierarchy, the process creates equity; rather than conflict-based debating, the process uses deliberation; rather than marginalising difference, the process thrives on diverse perspectives. Citizen-led decision-making, instead of group-led decision-making, doesn’t just diversify the range of voices heard, it enriches the quality of the decisions.
Such a paradigm shift could see the outcomes of decision-making processes reflect the nuanced needs and aspirations of local communities, making a significant stride towards achieving more equitable and sustainable growth. It could mark progress away from the current model in which decisions are unduly influenced by the voices and concerns of vested interests and those with incumbent power.
To achieve this, multiple actors need to come together – from local authorities to community networks to business communities. These groups need to collaborate to mandate the idea of a citizens’ assembly and agree to work together to deliver its recommendations. There are examples where this has happened. In 2014, Romsey Future was launched as a community partnership. In 2019 a citizens’ assembly was held in Romsey to answer the question: How do we improve the area around Crossfield Hall and the bus station to deliver the maximum benefit to Romsey? Citizens were asked to consider accessibility, appearance and how the area is used as a place to live, work and enjoy. The recommendations fed into the development of the masterplan for the area and in 2024 plans were unveiled to hold a second citizens’ assembly to drill into more specific elements of the town centre’s development. There is an available case study of the 2019 assembly here and an analysis of its work here.
International examples include an Irish citizens' assembly in 2017 which addressed how the country should approach climate change. One of the outcomes focused on sustainable and equitable growth, particularly in rural areas leading to policy changes such as promoting renewable energy and ensuring that communities who were most affected by climate policies had a say in how those policies were implemented.
In Gdansk in 2016-17 several citizens' assemblies were held including one in response to local flooding issues, which disproportionately affected poorer communities. The assembly on flood defences made 16 recommendations which had over 80% of assembly member support; other assemblies addressed housing inequalities, and improving access to public services. The structure of these assemblies determined that recommendations with over 80% support were mandatory and a year later a progress report showed that the city authorities had implemented 90% of those recommendations.
The key thing about these examples is that they do not just localise decision-making they democratise the decision-making framework. Without this democratisation of the way decisions are made, efforts to simply localise decision-making risk perpetuating the existing dysfunction and disparity of conventional group-led decision-making.
There is a further emerging example which could show a way forward for the cultural sector; it is called Citizens for Culture. It seeks to develop a cultural delivery plan for the West of England using a citizens’ assembly; the approach has the support of the Combined Authority, Bath and North East Somerset Council, Bristol City Council, North Somerset Council and South Gloucestershire Council.
The citizens’ assembly for culture will be made up of a descriptively representative group of citizens working together with people from across the sector to consider evidence, deliberate and build an inclusive plan. Initiated by LaToyah McAllister-Jones (St Pauls Carnival) and Emma Harvey (Trinity Community Arts), working with Citizens In Power, the project seeks to challenge the formation of a conventional top-down strategy by actively engaging citizens in the creation of a cultural plan.
In addition to Authorities, partnerships are being built (from 2023 to 2025) with community-led organisations, businesses, and with people working across the breadth and depth of the cultural sector. For example, the structure and values of the assembly were designed in 2023 by citizens from across the West of England. The intention is to collectively design the assembly question, its structure, and to build trust in the process across a diverse range of communities and stakeholders.
When the assembly takes place in Spring 2025, citizens will be randomly selected through a process called sortition, ensuring a descriptively representative sample of the public is brought together. This selection by lottery is crucial, as it democratises participation, giving every citizen in the region an equal chance to influence cultural policy. In our view, the process must be augmented by actively making connections with under-represented communities, in advance of the lottery process, to ensure they understand the opportunity, recognise the support that is offered to participants, and to encourage engagement with the lottery process.
The people who take part in Citizens for Culture will be supported financially and provided with assistance, tailored to their circumstances and needs, to ensure the process is fully accessible and that everyone can equitably engage. The assembly will be adapted to suit different learning styles and will provide development opportunities for participants to learn new skills. A wide range of evidence and contrasting views will be curated by an independent panel with a range of professional expertise and lived experience. Assembly members will deliberate over this evidence for a period of up to six days. By facilitating a process where citizens encounter diverse perspectives, asking questions, and seeking consensus, the project embodies the inclusive and deliberative nature of citizen-led decision-making.
The strategic timing of this assembly aligns with current political shifts and likely devolution packages; positioning the West of England as a proactive region in cultural policy innovation. We hope the assembly's outcomes will inform future funding applications and partnerships in the region, demonstrating how citizen-led decision-making can effectively leverage inward investment and support sustainable cultural growth.
Citizens for Culture is one partnership of a UK-wide network which includes seven other partnerships and collaborations in different areas. The Citizens In Power Network aims to support the development and implementation of citizen-led decision-making in different contexts. The network emphasises three core principles of citizen-led decision-making:
1) genuine decision-making authority; 2) random selection of participants; 3) deliberative inclusive and democratic processes. By adhering to these three principles, the network facilitates the emergence of new governance models, policy development, programming approaches, and resource distribution strategies; all of which are citizen-led.
Each network member is making a significant commitment to embed citizen-led decision-making into its work going forwards. The common theme is that members are both opening up who gets to make decisions and the way in which those decisions are made. We think it is this dual commitment to both local representation and more democratic methods of decision-making that is important.
The network represents a shift away from group-led decision-making towards a model in which those same groups, who have resource and power, see themselves in service to the wider community. They achieve this by using a different decision-making process; to be led by the interests, passions and assets of citizens and communities. At the heart of citizen-led decision-making are the ideas of service and partnership. We think we need to proliferate and innovate models of citizen-led decision-making to enable a transition to a better and more sustainable way of making decisions at every level.
Citizens for Culture is funded by Arts Council England, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Paul Hamlyn Foundation. Citizens In Power Network is funded by Esmee Fairbairn Foundation and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.
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