Name: DemocracyNext
Price range: $

DemocracyNext is an international foundation working to accelerate the spread of high quality, empowered, and permanent citizens’ assemblies.

Across the globe, there is widespread consensus that democracy is in crisis. We see the roots of the democratic crisis in people’s lack of agency to shape their destinies and the failure of our governance systems to address hard, complex issues. Some turn to strong man leaders, others to technocrats for solutions. We advocate for deliberative democracy and citizens’ assemblies.

We believe in a more just, joyful, and collaborative future, where everyone has meaningful power to shape their societies. We work to shift who has power and how we take decisions in government and in institutions of daily life like workplaces, schools, and museums.

Citizens’ assemblies are brave spaces for creative problem solving, designed for exercising our collective intelligence, engaging with complexity, and finding common ground.

At their heart are three key ideas – sortition (selecting decision makers by lottery), deliberation (collectively weighing evidence for shared decisions), and rotation (taking turns representing, and being represented by others).

Our hypothesis is that if people have greater agency in decision making, the ripple effects contribute to a thriving, resilient society of active citizens, where people have stronger trust in one another, a meaningful sense of belonging, and are less polarised. Citizens’ assemblies lead to more legitimate and informed decisions, policies, and resource allocations.

Our values inform how we approach our work – with rigour, curiosity, in collaboration with others, and with an ambition to be visionary. We don’t just tinker at the margins of the status quo. We seed the change we want to see.

Our work

We strategically work in collaboration with others to support and grow the global deliberative democracy movement by:

01 Creating infrastructure

Creating the infrastructure needed to scale the number of people and organisations with the know-how to implement and facilitate citizens’ assemblies. We collect data and good practices, create resources, frameworks, templates, and guidelines, and convene cross-sector networks.

02 Building institutions

Engaging with decision makers to establish citizens’ assemblies as new institutions that lead to systemic change and shift power. We advise ambitious leaders across multiple fields – from cities to governments, cultural and financial organisations, to cooperatives and educational institutions. We are not a practitioner organisation; we build local practitioner capacity.

03 Experimenting with innovations

Experimenting and researching innovations that push the boundaries of the field, improve quality and legitimacy, and accelerate the spread of citizens’ assemblies. While we have evidence of ‘what works’, there are still many unanswered research questions and many innovations to be tried. We are also testing new ways to apply technology and AI before, during, and after citizens’ assemblies.

04 Inspiring storytelling

Creative storytelling that inspires people to learn and to act for another democratic future, powered by the stories of assemblies from around the world. We produce engaging videos and articles, speak at high-level conferences, and partner on exhibitions to reach decision makers and the wider public.

05 Investing in systemic change

Investments in the enabling conditions for sustainable systemic change. We help decision makers to identify the teams and infrastructure needed for ensuring that citizens’ assemblies are sustainable. We invest in getting local civic hubs (in the language of systems change, these are sometimes called “systems orchestrators”) off the ground. We know these hubs are helpful to connect elected and public officials, academia, civil society organisations, and other local community actors to enable network growth, learning, and local funding. So far our investments have been modest; we seek to scale these activities in the future.

Find out more:

Current Projects
Papers
Resources
Our flagship Assembling an Assembly Guide

Download an overview: About DemocracyNext (PDF)