In Approaches to change, Andrea Gewessler about the motivation behind current participative bottom up approaches as they are experimented with in Vorarlberg and eastern Switzerland:

"[...] they intended to adopt the approach of looking at what was not working as well as they wanted so that they could learn from their mistakes and improve. At that opportune moment they stumbled across Appreciative Inquiry (AI) and investigated what was working already instead. One of the big revelations was that their communities are already self-organising and that this self-organisation is a powerful change agent. So what works is creating an enabling environment rather than one that imposes change from the top. As a result of this finding, they revisited their entire approach to change. Instead of going into communities with a project idea such as an energy campaign, they offered communities their support with their own concerns that they wanted to work on and find solutions for."

"[...] The main fear that politicians have is that citizens could come up with fanciful wishes that require abundant financial resources and that are just not do-able. However, experience has shown that the opposite is the case – citizens generally recognise what is working and consider it their own responsibility to improve things further. Insights like this can only come from the people."

www.fenews.co.uk

Mit Participate.ch lancieren wir das Konzept vom Konsensforum als Instrument für deliberative Demokratie in der Schweiz:

Die aktuellen gesellschaftspolitischen Herausforderungen verlangen von uns ein anderes Vorgehen als das bekannte lineare Denkschema von Analyse-Planung-Umsetzung. Es braucht neue Wege des gegenseitigen Verständnisses für nachhaltigere Lösungen.

Das Konsensforum.

Ziel von Participate.ch ist es, Menschen durch die Teilnahme an einem Konsensforum dazu zu befähigen, sich eigenverantwortlich mit den Problemen Ihrer Lebenswelt zu beschäftigen und selbst nach Lösungen zu suchen. Das als Empowerment bezeichnete Konzept der Selbstbefähigung ist ein wesentliches Moment gesellschaftlicher Selbstorganisation und somit ein gelebtes Beispiel partizipativer Demokratie und Subsidiarität.

Die Methodik eines Konsensforums beruht auf einer einfachen Form der Bevölkerungsbeteiligung wie sie in der Schweiz bereits für das Zukunftsforum in Thalwil eingesetzt wurde, und welche es kostengünstig und rasch erlaubt, Selbstorganisation und Eigenverantwortung in der Bevölkerung zu stärken und bessere politische Lösungen zu finden.

Neue Ideen und Wahlmöglichkeiten

Ziel eines Konsensforums ist es, neue Ideen und Wahlmöglichkeiten zu finden, die von allen Beteiligten mitgetragen werden. Mit dem Konsensforum können Ideen entstehen, die über bekannte oder nahe liegende Lösungsansätze hinausgehen. Das Konsensforum trifft keine politischen Entscheidungen, kann aber alleine durch die öffentliche Präsentation der Überlegungen und Empfehlungen eine grosse Wirkung haben.

Aus unserer Sicht sind partizipativ-demokratische Strukturen wie das Konsensforum ein wichtiges und bislang fehlendes Element in der Zusammenarbeit zwischen der Politik, der Verwaltung, den Interessengruppen und der Bevölkerung.

Ablauf von Konsensforen

Während einem Konsensforum arbeiten jeweils 12-16 zufällig ausgewählte Personen zwei Tage hinter verschlossenen Türen am Thema. Aufgrund der Zufallsauswahl handelt es sich bei den TeilnehmerInnen um Leute aus der breiten Bevölkerung, die über keinerlei spezielles Vorwissen oder spezielle Qualifikationen verfügen. Insbesondere vertreten sie dadurch keine Interessengruppen, sondern ihre persönliche Meinung. Die TeilnehmerInnen schärfen während ihrer Zusammenarbeit die relevanten Fragen, Probleme und Lösungsideen und folgen dabei dem, was den Teilnehmenden wirklich wichtig ist. Die dahinterliegende Methode des Konsensforums ist sehr intensiv, da alle Zugänge und Perspektiven berücksichtigt werden und ein gemeinsames Anliegen entsteht.

Am Ende des zweiten Tages präsentieren diese 12-16 Personen in einer gemeinsamen Erklärung ihre Ergebnisse der Öffentlichkeit. Gemeinsam werden diese diskutiert. In Resonanzgruppen werden die Ergebnisse mit Vertretern aus Verwaltung und Politik weiter diskutiert und fliessen in die politischen Gremien ein.

Durch die Konsensforen entwickelt Participate.ch mit der Bevölkerung Ideen, die nicht nur innovativ sind, sondern auch breite Zustimmung, Identifikation und Akzeptanz finden.

participate.ch

www.handelsblatt.com

"Je stärker die Einwohner in einem Kanton selbst über die Verwendung der Staatsausgaben mitreden können, desto besser ist es dort um die öffentlichen Finanzen bestellt."

"Im Schnitt sind die Ausgaben in Kantonen mit automatischen Finanzreferenden um zwölf Prozent niedriger."

"Je leichter es für die Bürger ist, einen Volksentscheid gegen ein unliebsames Projekt auf den Weg zu bringen, desto langsamer wachsen dort die Staatsausgaben. Die Hürden für einen Volksentscheid messen [die Autoren der Studie] daran, wie viele Unterschriften nötig sind, um eine Bürgerbefragung zu initiieren. Mit jedem Prozentpunkt, um den das nötige Quorum sinkt, gehen die Ausgaben des Kantons um 0,6 Prozent zurück."

Patricia Funk, Christina Gathmann: Does Direct Democracy Reduce the
Size of Government?

Calls for direct democracy have recently become a lot more prevalent around the world in the context of the Arab Spring, Los Indignados and Occupy Wall Street movements. This begs the question, how direct democracy would practically work, not only on a local but also a national and international scope. Popular wisdom seems to be that electronic voting could be the silver bullet that would make this possible. However, not only is it hard to trust electronic voting whenever a secret ballot is required, but there is a lot more to making direct democracy work on that scale than simply dealing with the efficiency of counting votes.

In Switzerland, direct democracy has a long history, longer than the Swiss confederation itself, with some direct democracy roots going back over 1000 years. For the past 20 years, the Forum for Direct Democracy has been advocating the importance of preserving these aspects of the Swiss political system, and it is the only center-left movement with the objective of preventing Switzerland from joining the EEA and the EU, arguing from a direct-democratic, ecological and social perspective. Based on discussions I've had with fellow members of the Forum for Direct Democracy over the last few years, I would like to share some thoughts relating to how modern democracy in Switzerland in my opinion has yielded some additional institutional concepts, which are essential to its functioning. Extrapolating from that, I'm suggesting a direction for potential improvements to our system, which maybe should be taken into account from the beginning, when attempting to introduce more direct democracy elsewhere in the world. Consequently, what I am describing here is an entangled mixture of the current status quo and where I think we could be taking this with relatively minor effort.

Sovereignty and subsidiarity

Who makes the rules and enforces them is sovereign. Direct democracy is about the legislative decisions, the rules, being made by the people for the people.

The people that are affected by the rules should be deciding which rules need to be defined in that affected group. Rules that affect only a small group should be defined by consensus in that small group. For legislation that affects a larger group the consensus needs to be developed in that larger group. This is the essence of the Principal of Subsidiarity, which implies that authority should be with the most decentralized entity possible and more centralized entities should primarily support the decentralized ones.

Delegating authority from the most central to more decentralized entities makes subsidiarity a farce, since it implies ultimate central authority. If authority is to be with the most decentralized entity possible, as the principle of subsidiarity implies, then the authority can not be selectively delegated from a central entity. Instead it is to be delegated selectively from the most decentralized entity to more centralized entities.

In other words, the people are only free in a sovereign state, if that sovereignty is unconditionally delegated to the individual people, and the people maintain a consensus on what authority they give to the communities they belong to. The communities in turn delegate some authority to larger entities, and to the state, which as a result only exists because it is willed to exist by the people. The simple motivation for the people to provide such entities with authority is for the security one gets in return, in the form of solidarity and sustainability.

The state as a purely abstract concept

With the delegation of the sovereignty to the individuals, the state only continues to exist as an abstract concept towards the outside. The state is the entity that external powers respect as having sovereignty over a particular territory. With sovereignty delegated to the people, the state merely describes the conceptual borderline from which the sovereignty is delegated. For all practical purposes, if all the people of the world would be sovereign, there would be no state.

Free association to multiple communities

Communities are not necessarily always bound to a specific geographic territory. Multiple communities can share responsibilities or have separate responsibilities in the same territory or in overlapping territories, or even not be bound to a specific territory. In any case, all individuals should effectively be able to join any community they wish as an equal member, essentially without any preconditions.

Democracy is incompatible with centralized military power

Rules may be meaningless if they cannot be enforced, but much more importantly, the absence of a rule is just as meaningless, if it's enforcement can not be prevented. While the people may be able to delegate the enforcement of rules, the people must always be able to resist any unauthorized enforcement of rules on them. Effectively, this means that any police and military power needs to be as decentralized as the policy making. To be sovereign, the people must always have dissuasive power against any form of suppression.

Part 2: The Three Pillars of Democracy