Scaling up from everyday concerns to territorial politics and constitutional debate: deliberation among women in the Irish border area

Abstract

A gulf between constitutional and everyday perspectives is prevalent, and often overlain by gender divisions. To explore how this gulf can be bridged to allow for the inclusion of everyday concerns in constitutional discussion, we engaged with women in the Irish border area, a region where constitutional difference has striking effects in daily life. We held a series of small-scale deliberative cafés on cross-border health provision, which is linked to dysfunctions of regional governance and contentious constitutional issues. We asked if such open-ended deliberation allows everyday concerns to ‘scale out’ to wider territorial units and ‘scale up’ to the constitutional question. We found that the deliberative café, a radically inclusive method, facilitated a limited scaling up and out from everyday experience: participants collectively and credibly defined systemic dysfunctions on the regional level with policy implications for constitutional discussion. Although participants raised important political issues, they did not easily move from regional to constitutional discussion. We argue that this discursive disjuncture between regionalist policy and constitutional politics derives from a tension between wider regionalist state discourses (which determinedly avoid constitutional contention) and constitutional discourses (which lack a spatial dimension and assume one ‘ideal’ public rather than engage with many existing publics).