Comunità, partecipazione e democrazia deliberativa: un’esperienza italiana

There is little doubt that deliberative democracy represents the most important innovation in the democratic debate and practices of recent decades. In the 1990s, after the pioneering phase, scholars progressively elaborated on both the conceptual and the operational problems of deliberative processes. Moreover, the internal dynamics of deliberative arenas as well as their relationships with politics and policy-making have been increasingly addressed by such analyses. The book Discutere e agire. Una sperimentazione di democrazia deliberativa a Novara (edited by Giacomo Balduzzi e Davide Servetti, Novara, Interlinea, 2014) describes the main aspects of an Italian experience. Although this case is just one of the many taking place in a context of growing spread of deliberative democracy, it shows some original elements. The attempt to create a stable connection between citizen concerns and policy-making, discussed in this book, is comparable only with the experiences of participatory budgeting, which however are constrained within a format that limits citizens’ participation to the allocation of a portion of the municipal budget.