Where fundamental questions are prepared. Residents, organisations and the administration work out a proposal the council can act on.
what a forum is for
Councils are asked to decide questions whose effects run for decades, within a budget year, with limited time and often without the expertise to weigh the options. The usual answer is a proposal from one department, which carries that department’s view of the matter and little else.
A future forum prepares such questions properly and hands the council a worked proposal: tested against the developments that are already foreseeable, with its financing proven, and carried by the people who will live with it and the people who will have to implement it.
who takes part
Three groups, with fixed weights, so that no one of them can carry a proposal alone.
| group | share | why |
|---|---|---|
| residents drawn by lot | about 50 % | those who live with the result, selected at random so that the forum is not made up of the people who always come |
| organisations | about 30 % | local businesses, associations, emergency,institutions – those who hold knowledge of the subject and will be affected as bodies |
| the administration | about 20 % | those who will have to carry out the result, present while it is being shaped rather than handed it at the end |
Resistance is reported per group, not only as a single total. A proposal that the residents carry and the administration cannot implement is not a proposal, and the group figures make that visible before the vote rather than afterwards.
Members of the council may take part voluntarily, and are welcome, but they do not vote in the forum. They vote later, in the council, where their vote belongs. Keeping the two apart protects both: the forum from being a pre-vote, and the council from being presented with a result it has already been party to.
levels and formats
Forums can be held at every level at which decisions are taken – municipal, district, regional, national, and supranational. A question is dealt with at the level that holds competence for it.
Topic forums
Convened for one fundamental question. Some are one-off, such as whether to hold a particular event at all. Others recur, where a subject needs regulating again and again.
The annual conference
Once a year, one joint forum for the questions that cannot be answered separately: how financial and staff resources are allocated across the aims, and what goes into the five-year development plan. It is also where the safety review sits, since hazards compete for the same resources as everything else.
The five-year plan is prepared in the annual conference and adopted by the council. It is rolled forward every year rather than adopted anew, so the planning horizon never falls below five years.
moderation
A forum is moderated by someone who has no stake in the outcome. The moderator holds the procedure, not the content: making sure every group is heard, that objections are recorded as objections and concerns as concerns, and that the pause before deciding actually happens.
Preparation is part of the moderator’s task. Participants receive the material in advance, in a form a non-specialist can follow, with the assumptions and the open questions marked as such. A forum that has to be briefed on the day will decide on whatever was presented most confidently.
how it differs from a citizens’ assembly
A future forum borrows the principle of selection by lot from the citizens’ assembly, and differs from it in four ways.
| citizens’ assembly | future forum | |
|---|---|---|
| who sits in it | citizens only | residents, organisations and the administration, in fixed shares |
| when it meets | convened for one question, then dissolved | recurring, with an annual conference and topic forums as required |
| what it produces | recommendations, often without a route into implementation | a worked proposal with proven financing and the implementing body already at the table |
| how it decides | usually by majority | by consent, with systemic consensing where consent is not reached |
The decisive difference is the third. A citizens’ assembly that produces a good recommendation has still produced only a recommendation, and whether anything follows depends on goodwill. A forum in which the administration has sat throughout produces something that can be implemented, and a rejection costs the council an explanation.
The forum does not replace a citizens’ assembly. Where a question is genuinely one of values, and where the point is precisely to hear people unburdened by institutional interest, an assembly is the better instrument. The act provides for one where a council cannot reach a decision at all.