Exploring the role of sociotechnical systems to support deliberative localist decision-making

Abstract

The importance of civil society to our communities has always been socially significant but has an increasingly important economic and democratic function. The localism agenda of successive governments has pushed local authorities to devolve powers and responsibilities for community-level policymaking to civil society organisations while, at the same time, significantly reducing the funding required to adequately support such processes. Civil society groups are expected to fill the gaps left by local authorities without the skills, resources and experiences, or without the bureaucratic processes or participatory models of their erstwhile incumbents. At the same time, a crisis in democracy caused a growing mistrust of the political class has raised questions about the legitimacy of our political systems, and the aggregative logic of the internet, fuelled by nefarious politically motivated actors, has further obfuscated the boundaries between truth and knowledge. The thesis put forward in this dissertation is that in order for civil society to cope with the increased responsibilities that have been devolved to it while maintaining their civic and democratic duty, new and more extensive participatory forms of public engagement, and the sociotechnical systems to support such processes, are required—first, to foster inclusion and second, to realise the ethical, epistemic, democratic and civic virtues fostered through public deliberation about issues of shared concern. Deliberative systems—the idea of a distributed talk-based model of democracy—forms the underlying theory that drives this research, both conceptually in the way it motivates design and practically in the ways in which it shares the participatory ideals of localism. This dissertation seeks to explore the use of sociotechnical digital artefacts (or, sociodigital artefacts) to investigate the ways in which deliberative democracy is enacted in instances of localism where ‘highly interested’ but ‘nonrepresentative’ actors are collaboratively carrying out policy-making activities, taking decisions that affect the lives of their communities. This exploration takes shape over three case studies where I design, deploy, and evaluate the role of a sociodigital system intended to foster the qualities of deliberative democracy. In the final chapters I synthesise the insights from each study around a discussion on the interrelationship between HCI, localism, and deliberative democracy with a focus on the role of technology to support devolved decision-making.