Inclusion of migrants into deliberative decision making is a challenge. In order to improve democracy, we need deliberative processes that include randomly selected participants. Within these processes, there is a need to research specifically how to include multicultural profiles to deal adequately with their specificities (language, cultural and socioeconomic background). We need to understand which resources are needed to generate good participation designs to produce meaningful outcomes.

Small towns (10.000-50.000) in Madrid Region and Basque Country with high percentages of migrants.

Both regions are migrant attractors but those who cannot vote have little to say, as persons, in decision making processes. Including migrants (beyond migrant associations) is crucial in order to design more inclusive policies (covering all the fields), and to avoid the creation of cultural and economic ghettos, as well as racism and xenophobia. Small towns are also the home of different migrant communities. Those pseudo-rural towns are a more relaxed environment to connect and to work with those migrants and also to reflect on different perspectives than the usual approach centered in downtown migrant communities. It is important to think about mechanisms that can generate common ground understanding of shared problems and solutions.

We are focusing on migrant / multicultural communities in general, but local everyday people will also be included to increase diversity. We want to make maximum diverse groups to reach common ground outcomes that could be embedded in government’s decision making processes. To do that, we will adapt design and facilitation techniques that are usually applied to deliberative processes to make them useful in maximum cultural diversity scenarios. The people that will participate in our different pilots will be financially compensated.

1. Mapping migrant civil society and leadership in local towns. Connect with them and offer a collaboration programme.
2. Start a recruitment in collaboration with migrant connectors. Create a sample of everyday multicultural profiles to start working.
3. Run at least 2 pilots working in different round tables configurations. Test different participatory designs. Test direct translation mechanisms.
4. Final outcome in form of a report that includes a specific design for deliberative multicultural migrant inclusion.
5. Advocate in local and regional governments to implement the strategy-design to deal with real policy issues. Migrant workshops.

The impact of our project will be measured by our capacity to involve local or regional governments to run real decision making processes (in any field of policy) involving migrants. Our estimation is that between 2 to 5 governments could take the lead after our pilot project. Migrants will be included in relevant decision making processes that will affect their everyday lives.

Giving governments specific knowledge to insert multicultural profiles in decision making is very relevant. Doing it properly, taking into account the resources they need to jump over the gaps that language (especially in the case of women), cultural background and socioeconomic level can represent is crucial. With our project we will define specific designs for multicultural inclusion: how to overcome language barriers, diversity of understanding, diversity of motivations.

Multicultural deliberation is the base of democracy. Because we are living in a global interconnected world, we believe this experience would help to understand, beyond Europe, how the future of global governance should look like. Projects like this could become intermediate milestones in a final long term goal of World governance that could deal with global issues like climate change or health security.

Coordination, Design, Facilitation, Advocacy (Personnel costs) 30 000€
Connectors and recruitment (including an economic incentive for participants): 10 000€
Direct translation: 7 000€
Travels: 1000€

We are interested in knowing more experiences across Europe of multicultural deliberation processes. We know processes that have been implemented for instance by Bertelsmann Stiftung (Citizens' dialogue - 5 nations, 4 languages in Europe), and would be interested in knowing more of them.