Deliberative Democracy or Discursively Biased? Perth's Dialogue with the City Initiative

Abstract

The State Government in Western Australia has portrayed itself as a champion of revitalising local democracy and civic engagement. This can be seen in the plethora of community consultation/participation policy documents that have emerged from the Premier's Citizens and Civics Unit over the past five years. Dialogue with the City, a major participatory planning process that formed part of the development of a new strategic plan—Network City—for metropolitan Perth, has been heralded as an exemplar of deliberative democracy. This paper draws on deliberative democratic theory, performative policy analysis and institutional discourse analysis to interrogate the efficacy of this claim by examining the discursive practices leading up to and including the Community Forum, a major consultative and participatory event of the Dialogue Initiative. It is argued that, whilst the Dialogue Initiative was supported by rhetorical deliberative utterances from political leaders and planning experts and exhibited, superficially at least, a number of attributes associated with deliberative democracy, the overall process fell short of this ideal. The primary reasons for this were that the process was scripted and stage-managed and lacked sufficient space and time for citizens to engage in genuine inclusionary argumentation and social learning. Hence the Dialogue Initiative may be viewed as an exercise more reflective of a mix of consultative and participatory planning conducted widely.

The author is grateful for the constructive comments from the two anonymous referees, comments by Louis Albrechts on the initial version of this paper and guidance from Ronan Paddison.

Notes

1. Civil renewal has since become the portfolio responsibility of the Department for Communities and Local Government (formerly the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister).

2. The CCU has since been decommissioned.

3. The term ‘Dialogue Initiative’ will be used throughout to describe the ‘Dialogue with the City’ initiative.