Deliberating with purpose: Deliberative civic engagement for health policy

Abstract

This article seeks to understand why deliberative civic engagement is chosen as a method of engagement by policymakers, using two jurisdictions as exploratory cases: the Nova Scotia Health Authority's Community Conversations about Collaborative Family Practice Teams and Algoma Ontario Health Team's Citizen Reference Panel on Integrated Care. The purpose is to interrogate a presumption that deliberative civic engagement is choice driven by an alignment between the goals of engagement and theories of deliberation. I find that in both instances, policymakers chose deliberative civic engagement largely because of situational factors, rather than through the theoretical claims of different methods of engagement and the goals of the engagement activity. I argue that for practitioners seeking to embed deliberative processes, greater consideration should be given to the contextual factors that enable or inhibit the commissioning of such activities.