Belgium: a permanent citizens' council

01 From the one-off event to the permanent institution

Most of the international examples – from Ireland to France – are one-off processes convened for a single concrete question. These have their own strength, but they also share a common weakness: the knowledge, experience and momentum accumulated within them dissipate at the end of the process, and with the next issue everything has to start from scratch. Moreover, the occasional character makes it harder for deliberative participation to become genuinely embedded in decision-making.

East Belgium – Belgium's small, roughly 77,000-strong German-speaking community – gave a novel answer to precisely this problem. In 2019, by a local parliamentary decision, it created a permanent deliberative institution that works durably and continuously alongside the legislature. This was the first case in the world in which citizen participation based on sortition was built into the democratic system not as a project, but as a permanent institution enshrined in law. The literature refers to the solution as the "Ostbelgien model".

02 How is the model structured?

The system consists of two interdependent elements, and it is precisely this duality that gives it its strength.

• Permanent Citizens' Council (Bürgerrat). A smaller body selected by sortition that works on a durable basis. It does not decide on concrete issues, but is the "conductor" of the process: it determines which topics the assemblies should deal with, organises and launches them, then tracks what becomes of their recommendations.
• Citizens' Assemblies (Bürgerversammlung). These are bodies convened for concrete questions, made up of a few dozen – typically 25–50 – residents selected by sortition, who deliberate on a given issue and formulate recommendations to decision-makers.

Participants are selected into both bodies by sortition, so that the groups mirror the population. Members of the Council hold their office for a set, limited time – typically a good year – and then hand their place over to new members, so that the body continually renews itself and does not develop into a closed, self-perpetuating elite.

03 The key: mandatory and public follow-through

The model's perhaps most important innovation lies not in its structure but in its consequences. The recommendations of the assemblies do not vanish into the system: the local parliament and government must respond to them publicly and substantively. They must give reasons for what they accept and what they do not – and if they reject a proposal, they must explain that too. And the implementation of the accepted recommendations is tracked precisely by the Permanent Council.

This built-in, mandatory follow-through is exactly the point at which the French climate convention failed. In East Belgium the system does not leave it to the goodwill of decision-makers whether they deal with the proposals – it institutionally compels the response and the tracking. In this way the model remedies precisely the most sensitive weakness of deliberative processes.

04 How was the model born?

The East Belgian model did not come out of nowhere. Its precursor was an experimental citizen process that grew out of a civil-society initiative, which showed that deliberation based on sortition works locally too. The experience was so convincing that the local parliament decided not to let the momentum fade, but to turn it into a durable institution. The system was created in 2019, by parliamentary decision, enshrined in law – with this, deliberative participation in East Belgium became not a project dependent on the goodwill of a government, but a permanent, legally embedded part of the democratic structure.

This moment is instructive in itself. It shows how a community can move beyond one-off experiments to institutionalisation: first it tries out the method on a tangible issue, gains experience and trust, then casts the proven practice into a durable framework. Institutionalisation is not the first step, but the way to preserve success.

05 Why is this model important?

The Ostbelgien model is pioneering in several respects. First: it makes deliberative participation durable. Rather than a series of enthusiastic projects fading away without a trace, a continuous institution accumulates the experience and makes citizen involvement routine. Second: it gives real, predictable influence. Because of the mandatory follow-through, participation is not a symbolic gesture but is built into the course of decision-making. Third: it works not instead of the representative system, but alongside it. The elected parliament and the citizen bodies selected by sortition work together, complementing one another – the deliberative element does not replace democracy but enriches it.

The model's scale – a small community – is at once its virtue and its limitation. On a small scale it is easier to introduce and operate such a system, and the closeness of the local community helps too. It is an open question how this can be scaled to larger, more populous communities. Yet it is precisely this that makes it valuable experimental terrain: it shows in real life what deliberative democracy can look like when it is not an occasional guest but a permanent resident in decision-making.

06 International resonance and spread

Relative to its small size, the East Belgian model has received enormous international attention. As the world's first permanent deliberative institution tied to a parliament, it became a point of reference for all those who envisage citizen participation not as an occasional project but as a durable system. Many cities and regions have studied its structure and drawn on it when shaping their own permanent or recurring citizen bodies.

The model's spread signals that the next phase in the development of deliberative democracy may be precisely institutionalisation. While the great experiments of the 2010s were mostly one-off assemblies, the trend of recent years increasingly points towards durability: permanent councils, recurring assemblies, built-in follow-through obligations. East Belgium is a pioneer in this – living proof that deliberation based on sortition can be not only an exciting experiment, but also a workable, durable part of the democratic institutional system.

07 What can we learn from it?

The chief lesson of the East Belgian example is that deliberative participation need not be only a one-off event, but can be a durable institution too. Anyone who takes citizen involvement seriously would do well to move beyond the logic of individual projects and to think about how participation can be made regular and predictable. The other lesson is the institutionalisation of follow-through: the model forestalls disappointment precisely by grounding the decision-makers' response not in goodwill, but in a rule.

08 Summary

East Belgium showed that deliberative democracy can become a permanent institution too. The Permanent Citizens' Council and the assemblies linked to it form a durable, sortition-based system built alongside the parliament, at the centre of which stands mandatory, public follow-through. This model remedies precisely the weakness that undermined the great one-off experiments – such as the French convention. The series' closing article shifts the scale: through city-level European examples it shows how deliberative participation can bring tangible results in local matters.

Sources

• Bürgerdialog Ostbelgien – Was ist der Bürgerrat / die Bürgerversammlung? · buergerdialog.be
• The Ostbelgien Model: a long-term Citizens' Council · oidp.net
• Niessen, C. & Reuchamps, M. (2020): Institutionalising Citizen Deliberation in Parliament: The Permanent Citizens' Dialogue in the German-speaking Community of Belgium · KU Leuven
• G1000: Report on the G1000 citizens' summit · g1000.org
• OECD (2020): Catching the Deliberative Wave · oecd.org