Tackling civic participation challenges with emerging technologies

Executive summary

This paper explores how emerging digital technologies—such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, and virtual reality— can improve citizen participation and deliberation. It builds on an assessment of existing gaps and barriers in participatory and deliberative processes that draws upon OECD analysis, recent case studies and interviews with diverse stakeholders including public authorities, civil society organisations, academia and civic technologists. It then analyses the potential of emerging technologies to address and solve these challenges. It offers a particular focus on the experience of the Netherlands, Portugal and Spain.

It leverages extensive OECD work in open government, citizen participation, CivicTech and GovTech, digital government and public sector innovation. In particular, it builds on previous publications including the OECD Deliberative Toolbox, the OECD Guidelines for Citizen Participation Processes, and the forthcoming paper “New Frontiers of Citizen Participation in Policy Making”, as well as in-depth research on digital technologies and its interaction with the public sector. The paper contributes to the global discussion on democracy in the digital age, in particular to the OECD Reinforcing Democracy Initiative and its Action Plan on Transforming Public Governance for Digital Democracy. This paper is part of a collaboration with Portugal, the Netherlands and Spain with the support of the European Commission under the Technical Support Instrument (TSI) on “Improving civic participation with emerging technologies” (23PT04). The paper “Partners in participation: Key insights from innovation ecosystems for civic participation and emerging technologies in Portugal, the Netherlands and Spain” provides additional evidence and more in-depth analysis of the field and actors at the country level.

Key findings

This paper explores the potential of emerging technologies, moving beyond traditional applications such as participation platforms, tools leveraging data, data analytics, and online peer-to-peer collaboration. While acknowledging the foundational work in these first-generation technologies, it focuses on the next wave of innovation. Specifically, the paper examines the opportunities of technologies powered by advancements in artificial intelligence, cryptography, and virtual reality.

It takes a pragmatic approach to explore the benefits of emerging technologies by looking at how these technologies can solve or address existing challenges faced both by governments and citizens in the cycle of a participatory process, from design to the implementation of its results.

This paper looks at the following challenges:

1) Evidence shows that a significant proportion (44% on average across OECD) of citizens tend not to trust their governments, nor that the government would adopt the opinions expressed in a public consultation (44.6% on OECD average).

2) Impact of participation can be hindered by lack of feedback and accountability.

3) Institutional challenges and disconnection with decision-making processes remain a barrier to impact.

4) Participatory processes are not always inclusive nor accessible.

5) Poorly designed processes can create barriers to participation.

6) Isolation from the broader society can hinder legitimacy and impact.

7) Participatory and deliberative process can be vulnerable to undue influence.

8) Public authorities usually lack adapted capacities and resources.

Building on case studies and desk research, the paper finds eight areas of opportunity for emerging technologies to help address existing challenges. 1) Blockchain technologies can increase trust in participatory processes by enabling secure and resilient electronic voting. 2) AI-powered technologies can help increase the impact of participatory processes by helping governments analyse and make sense of large amounts of inputs. 3) AI moderation can expand the reach of deliberation by enabling massive online conversations. 4) Generative AI can lower the barriers to participate by helping the public navigate complex or technical language and provide assistance to participants. 5) VR/AR can increase empathy and lower barriers of participation by enabling simulated scenarios and connecting with real-life evidence. 6) Virtual and augmented realities can improve the design of participatory processes by creating immersive and dynamic experiences for participants. 7) AI and Gen AI can augment the impact of participatory and deliberative processes by connecting small group processes with the broader public, thus enhancing legitimacy and societal engagement on the addressed policy issue. 8) Blockchain can shield participatory processes from vulnerabilities or security risks, mainly through authentication applications.

Among these technologies, AI stands out as the most promising for immediate and further study. Blockchain has yet to demonstrate substantial real-world impact in the context of participation, and despite its potential to create immersive and engaging platforms for participatory experiences, virtual reality remains in an exploratory phase with limited practical applications to date.

The paper also highlights risks governments might face when deploying emerging technologies in participatory and deliberative processes, for example, mistrust in the processes, threats to civic space, inequalities of access and use, online toxic environments, privacy threats, and increased environmental impact. It also suggests actions and guardrails governments can put in place to mitigate such risks.

Key recommendations

This paper suggests a list of actions for governments, the participation ecosystem (civil society organisations, designers, evaluators, researchers, facilitators, innovators, etc.) and civic technologists to ensure emerging technologies have a positive impact on participatory and deliberative processes:

• Ensure transparency, accountability and contestability of emerging technologies used in participatory and deliberative processes. For example, by designing dedicated guidelines, tools and promoting and enabling scrutiny thanks to open source, open code, and documentation through standards or registries.

• Promote inclusion and equality in the use and access of emerging technologies by providing an in-person or analogue alternative to all participatory processes and investing in digital skills both in government and across society.

• Enable experimentation and innovation in participation by supporting research and development in and outside government and promoting uses of emerging technologies in participatory and deliberative processes.

• Protect human rights and civic freedoms as inherent to the development and deployment of emerging technologies in participatory or deliberative mechanisms by establishing complaint mechanisms, elaborating ethical guidelines and guardrails for the use of emerging technologies in citizen participation.

• Nurture innovation and participation ecosystems by committing to open source as an enabler of greater transparency and effective collaboration, and by building communities of practice or networks to support learning, peer-to-peer support and collaboration.

• Provide adequate support to develop, adopt and scale emerging technologies by investing in developing the right skills and capabilities in the public sector, ensuring sustainable funding mechanisms or supporting digital public infrastructures.

• Involve the public in the design, development, deployment, regulation, and governance of emerging technologies so as to build trust and promote the development of technology in line with democratic principles.