Purpose of this briefing paper
This briefing shares helpful information about what citizens’ assemblies are, how they work, and what they can achieve – including the outputs you can expect from the process.
It addresses how they may complement governance, in particular neighbourhood governance, and includes information useful for procurement/commissioning.
1. What are citizens’ assemblies?
Citizens’ assemblies are a form of deliberative democracy, designed to support decision-making on complex, contested, or value-laden issues. They bring together a group of residents, selected through sortition (random selection, broadly representative of the relevant population), and give them time, information, and facilitation to learn, deliberate, and reach collective judgements.
Typical features include:
- Sortition to involve people who would not normally participate
- A structured learning phase, drawing on evidence, expert input, and lived experience.
- Facilitated deliberation, enabling respectful discussion across different perspectives.
- An agreed output, such as recommendations or decisions, with clarity about how these will be used.
Citizens’ assemblies differ from consultation or engagement exercises in that they are designed for judgement rather than opinion. Their value lies in the quality, legitimacy, and fairness of the process, rather than the number of people involved.
2. What do citizens’ assemblies achieve?
Experience of citizens’ assemblies consistently highlights several outcomes:
- Legitimacy: Outcomes are often seen as more legitimate because participants broadly reflect the community, rather than self-selecting groups.
- Better-quality decisions: Given time to learn and consider trade-offs, participants frequently reach more nuanced and realistic conclusions.
- Trust and fairness: Even where people disagree with outcomes, they are more likely to accept them if the process is perceived as fair and inclusive.
Assemblies do not remove disagreement. Instead, they help to surface where agreement exists, where it does not, and why. This type of information is often missing from traditional engagement.
3. How citizens’ assemblies work in practice
Citizens’ assemblies are shaped by a series of design choices, rather than a fixed model. These choices become particularly important at neighbourhood level.
Who is involved?
Assemblies use sortition to reach beyond the “usual voices”. This typically involves:
- A random invitation issued to a large pool of households.
- Responses used to form a group broadly representative of the population, based on agreed demographic criteria.
- Payment to participants for their time (often linked to the living wage), alongside practical support.
During the working group discussion, there was interest in applying this approach to defined places such as housing estates. It was noted that:
- Assemblies or juries can be run for a specific neighbourhood or estate, with the sampling frame restricted accordingly.
- Demographic representation can still be achieved within that population.
- Learning can be enhanced by including lived-experience witnesses from other neighbourhoods or estates, helping participants to see beyond their immediate context and avoid insular decision-making.
What do participants do?
Assemblies generally involve:
- A learning phase, combining evidence, expert perspectives, and lived experience.
- Facilitated deliberation, designed to make disagreement constructive rather than adversarial.
- Decision-making approaches that aim to clarify both areas of consensus and disagreement.
A recurring insight is that deliberation often changes what people think is possible, particularly when discussion starts from shared understanding rather than fixed positions.
What happens to the output?
Outputs may include:
- Binding decisions (less common)
- Recommendations, with a formal commitment to respond
- Advice to inform policy, strategy, or scrutiny
Clarity about the status of outputs is critical. Where the relationship between participation and decision-making is unclear, trust can be undermined.
4. Cost and proportionality
Indicative costs discussed included:
- Around £100k for a full citizens’ assembly at local authority level
- Higher costs at national level
- A significant part of that expenditure is spent on sortition, participant payment, independent design, and professional facilitation
It was also noted that:
- Smaller deliberative processes, such as citizens’ juries, can cost £25–30k
- Costs can be reduced by scaling the process and being clear about purpose.
- It is possible to design lighter-touch deliberative processes, focusing on specific elements such as sortition or structured deliberation.
A concern was raised that isolating individual elements might reduce impact. In response, it was noted that while full assemblies offer great benefits, carefully designed processes that prioritise the elements most relevant to a particular challenge, community and desired outcome are still very effective.
5. What neighbourhood governance can learn from deliberative democracy
Rather than asking whether neighbourhoods should “run” citizens’ assemblies, the session explored what neighbourhood governance might learn from deliberative approaches more broadly.
Key lessons include:
Hearing from fewer people, chosen well, can be more legitimate than hearing from many people who all share similar characteristics or levels of confidence.
Neighbourhood governance often asks people for views without a shared evidence base. Deliberative approaches show the value of investing in collective learning before decisions are made.
Neighbourhood issues are often contested. Deliberative processes help to surface why people disagree and where values or priorities diverge, rather than treating disagreement as failure.
Trust is sustained when people understand what influence they have and how decisions will be taken. Ambiguity about power can be more damaging than limited power.
People are more likely to accept decisions they disagree with if they believe the process was fair, inclusive, and transparent.
These lessons may be relevant even where a full citizens’ assembly is not proportionate or appropriate.
6. Further provocations for reflection
Although time did not allow these to be explored in the session, the following provocations are offered to support ongoing reflection. They are framed as thought experiments rather than proposals.
- What if neighbourhood governance was itself deliberative?
For example, a neighbourhood body selected wholly through sortition, with residents serving for a fixed period as a civic duty.
- What if neighbourhood decision-making was shared?
For example, hybrid models where councillors and randomly selected residents deliberate together as equal participants, with shared learning and collective responsibility.
- What if learning came before opinion?
For example, neighbourhood decisions beginning with a structured learning phase before positions are taken.
- What if participation was rotated rather than permanent?
For example, spreading civic responsibility more widely and reducing reliance on a small number of highly active individuals.
- What if success was measured differently?
For example, assessing neighbourhood governance by perceived fairness and legitimacy, rather than turnout or satisfaction alone.
These provocations are intended to open up thinking about how neighbourhood democracy might be designed differently if starting from first principles.
Final reflection
A question that may be useful for the working group to hold as its work progresses is:
If neighbourhood democracy were being designed from scratch today — informed by what is now known about trust, inequality, participation, and decision-making, would the systems currently in place look the same?
This briefing is offered as a contribution to the working group’s wider exploration of neighbourhood governance, alongside other participatory and representative models.
Additional information
What people misunderstand most about recruitment, B. Sandor, Sortition Foundation, Jan 23, 2026
https://beasandor.substack.com/p/what-people-misunderstand-most-about
Participants experience of taking part in a Citizen Assembly on Hate Crime.
We are particularly proud of this piece of work!
https://youtu.be/5QUWCZTGABE?si=0uCC1lCF8Z9aSsoe
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