Do Multilingual Citizens' Assemblies Work? Lessons from different approaches with interpreters and technology
In many contexts, multilingualism is a major design consideration for citizens’ assemblies.
This applies whether an assembly operates across multiple official languages, or simply reflects the linguistic diversity of its members. Typically it means some mixture of live interpretation, language buddies, multilingual facilitation, and technology coming together.
But do multilingual citizens’ assemblies actually work, and how? What are the trade-offs and considerations of the different approaches available? How are facilitators seizing the challenge as an opportunity to design a smooth and inclusive process?
In this DemocracyNext webinar, we will launch two reflection briefs; one by Hugh Pope about the EU citizens’ panel, and one by James MacDonald-Nelson and Hannah Terry about the Esch-sur-Alzette (Luxembourg) citizens’ assembly.
The EU citizens' panel covered the full breadth of EU linguistic diversity across 150 members and 24 languages. In Esch, the assembly works primarily in Luxembourgish, French, German, and English - and has also integrated Turkish, Arabic, and Portuguese.
Join us for a conversation spanning facilitation, interpretation, and technology. The question running through it all: can linguistic diversity be an asset to deliberation, not just a challenge to manage?
What we’ll explore
What multilingualism looked like in both an EU citizens’ panel and the Esch-sur-Alzette citizens’ assembly
The human-centric roles of interpretation
How technology can aid the process
Takeaways about the challenges, trade-offs, and opportunities of multilingual deliberation
Speakers
Hugh Pope, International Advisory Council Member, DemocracyNext
Hugh is an author, editor and veteran former Turkey, Middle East and Central Asia staff writer for The Wall Street Journal. Hugh spent fifteen years with The International Crisis Group, first leading the conflict prevention organisation’s Turkey/Cyprus Project and then serving as its global Director of Communications & Outreach. Most recently he led the editing and preparation for publication of The Keys to Democracy: Sortition as a New Model for Citizen Power. His own books include Dining with al-Qaeda: Making Sense of the Middle East; Sons of the Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World and, as co-author, Turkey Unveiled: A History of Modern Turkey.
James MacDonald-Nelson, DemocracyNext
James is a designer with degrees in landscape architecture, urbanism, and global development studies. Having studied and worked in spatial practice for 10 years in Canada and Europe, James has a deep knowledge of how the built environment is transformed and managed - and how often citizens are left out of these processes. At DemocracyNext, James is responsible for all things cities-related. This includes managing collaborations with cities around the world who have partnered with DemNext to broaden and deepen citizen participation and deliberation in urban planning decision-making processes - with Citizens’ Assemblies playing a central role. Alongside DemNext Fellow Gustav Kjær Vad Nielsen, James also leads the area of research and speculative design for the physical conditions and infrastructure needed for a more deliberative democracy.
Liz Thielen, Lead Facilitator, Snakke & Co
Evelien Nieuwenburg, Co-Founder and Value Lead, Dembrane
Constantin Schäfer, Director of EU Relations & Projects IFOK
Constantin focuses on citizen participation, deliberation and democratic resilience. He leads and contributes to transnational deliberative processes, such as the European Commission’s European Citizens’ Panels or the Young Citizens Assembly. As Senior Researcher, he is involved in research projects on democratic innovations, such as SCALEDEM and CLIMAS. He has a strong academic background in EU democracy and political participation, with previous positions at KU Leuven, the University of Münster, and the University of Mannheim, where he completed a PhD on attitudes towards European integration and European Parliament elections. He co-founded BETA, an association dedicated to empowering young people as active EU citizens.
Lisa Verhasselt, Research Associate, Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER)
Lisa serves as Principal Investigator for LISER in the Horizon Europe AntifragiCity project, focusing on the social acceptability dimension of urban mobility within the consortium’s broader work on resilient urban systems. She holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Luxembourg, where her research examined deliberative democracy in multilingual contexts. Her work provides original theoretical and empirical insights into how linguistic diversity shapes the inclusivity, authenticity, and consequentiality of deliberative mini-publics, deepening understanding of how language conditions representation, participation, and democratic legitimacy. Her research sits at the intersection of democratic innovation and multilingualism, contributing to an emerging research agenda on language-aware design. She advocates for deliberative processes that integrate linguistic inclusivity as a core design principle, rather than an afterthought, in order to strengthen democratic fairness and accessibility. Alongside her academic work, she has extensive experience bridging research and policy practice. She has contributed to the design, advisory processes, and evaluation of several large-scale citizens’ assemblies, including Luxembourg’s national climate assemblies, and is currently involved in initiatives such as the Esch Assembly and the Global Assembly.
Moderated by:
Claudia Chwalisz, Founder and CEO, DemocracyNext
Claudia has been working on democratic innovation for over a decade, initially sparked by her research on populism and the extent to which it is driven by people’s disillusionment with the political system and with a lack of agency to shape the decisions affecting their lives. Claudia was involved in designing the world’s first permanent Citizens’ Assemblies in Paris, Ostbelgien, and Brussels. Claudia established and led the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation from 2018-2022, creating the Deliberative Democracy Toolbox, which includes a public database of over 700 examples of Citizens’ Assemblies, the flagship report Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020), standards for implementation (2020), and guidelines for evaluation and institutionalisation of deliberative assemblies (2021), as well guidelines for citizen participation processes (2022). She led the drafting of the OECD Action Plan on Enhancing Representation, Participation, and Openness in Public Life (2022) and the related chapter in the Building Trust and Reinforcing Democracy report (2022). Claudia also set up the OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Network and the blog Participo. She managed five pilot projects of citizen participation in cohesion policy, supported by the European Commission, advised on institutionalising deliberative democracy in the Basque Country in a project with Arantzazulab, and advised on designing deliberative processes in Finland and Lebanon.
This event is for:
Practitioners designing and facilitating multilingual assemblies
Technologists developing linguistic technology for deliberative processes
Commissioners of citizens’ assemblies in multilingual contexts
Researchers and students of democracy, governance, and public participation
This webinar will be recorded and shared after the session via our YouTube and Spotify accounts.