Trend Resilient citizen movements and institutionalised citizens' assemblies

Summary

The report finds that, amid democratic erosion, there are also hopeful developments, one of which is the resilience of civic movements in various countries. A growing number of countries, cities and regions are experimenting with citizens' assemblies or citizens' parliaments, and in several places these assemblies are no longer merely experiments but have been built structurally into governance. Between 2001 and 2023, OECD countries launched 148 new deliberative bodies, most of them at regional or local level. Such processes are often used for complex, long-term questions in which value judgements weigh heavily in forming opinions. The report explains that in Central and Eastern Europe citizens' assemblies are increasingly used as a democratic counterweight to authoritarian tendencies.