Progressing sustainability requires a more networked approach to governance—an approach that connects otherwise segmented policy areas and fosters greater communication among governments, stakeholders and citizens. Of particular importance is the development of discursive spaces in which diverse actors are able to explore the differing knowledge, perspectives and values raised by the challenge of sustainability. This thesis develops the notion of transactional space to bring into focus the processes of reflection, dialogue and mutual learning that effective sustainability discourse involves. In the first part of the thesis I review literature on the theory and practice of participation, deliberation and collaboration, giving particular attention to the ways in which these processes have potential to create space for a depth of exchange and enable participants to engage with the tensions inherent in complex policy issues. While many authors point to the importance of negotiating difference in these processes, the literature reveals that, in practice, this type of exchange tends to be overlooked or underdeveloped. I therefore argue in this thesis that critical, reflective dialogue plays a key role in generating greater understanding among participants, more comprehensive understanding of policy issues, and more integrative and shared approaches, and for these reasons must be actively developed. The case study in the second part of the thesis explores this concern for developing reflective exchange in practice. The formation of the Western Australian Collaboration in 2002—a partnership of non-government organizations from a range of social and environmental perspectives committed to ‘a just and sustainable Western Australia’—represented an opportunity to examine the development of participatory and collaborative processes for sustainability. The thesis presents a case study of the WA Collaboration’s development over 2002-2006 to illustrate the potential such networks and open forums offer for transformative exchange around sustainability. It describes the intensive process conducted with the Steering Committee to cultivate a culture of reflection and learning in the organization, and the practical initiatives the process helped to generate. The thesis concludes with a discussion of the lessons learnt and key principles and practical considerations relevant to fostering transactional space. The WA Collaboration experience and the review of literature reveal a tendency in practice to privilege action and outcomes over reflection and learning. Furthermore, despite the necessity for a depth of engagement with complex policy issues, funding systems and policy environments often fail to allow the time and resources needed to support genuine dialogue and collaborative work. The thesis provides the concept and principles of transactional space as a means of helping to address this imbalance. They are designed to encourage practitioners to create opportunities for critical, reflective dialogue in a range of deliberative settings.

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Every healthcare system faces unlimited demands and limited resources, creating a need to make decisions that may limit access to some new, potentially effective technologies. It has become increasingly clearer that such decisions are more than technical ones. They require social value judgements - statements of the publics distributive preferences for healthcare across the population. However, these value judgements largely remain ill-defined. The purpose of this thesis was to explicate distributive preferences of the public to inform funding/coverage decisions on new health technologies. It contains six papers. The first comprises a systematic review of current coverage processes around the world, including value assumptions embedded within them. The second paper presents findings from an expert workshop and key-informant interviews with senior-level healthcare decision-makers in Canada. A technology funding decision-making framework, informed by the results of the first paper and the experiences of these decision-makers, was developed. Their input also highlighted the lack of and need for information on values that reflect those of the Canadian public. The third paper provides a systematic review of empirical studies attempting to explicate distributive preferences of the public. It also includes an analysis of social value arguments found in appeals to negative coverage decisions. From the results of both components, possible approaches to eliciting social values from the public and a list of factors around which distributive preferences may be sought were compiled. Such factors represented characteristics of unique, competing patient populations. Building on findings from the third paper, the fourth paper describes a citizens jury held to explicate distributive preferences for new health technologies in Alberta, Canada. The jury involved a broadly representative sample of the public, who participated in decision simulation exercises involving trade-offs between patient populations characterized by different combinations of factors. A list of preference statements, demonstrating interactions among such factors, emerged. The fifth and sixth papers address methodological issues related to citizens juries, including the comparability of findings from those carried out in the same way but with different samples of the public, and the extent to which they changed the views of individuals who participate in them.

This thesis empirically examines how lobby groups and activists respond to innovative forms of public participation. The study centres on processes that foster a particular kind of deliberative governance including citizens’ juries, consensus conferences and planning cells. These deliberative designs bring together a panel of randomly selected lay citizens to deliberate on a specific policy issue for a few days, with the aim of providing decision makers with a set of recommendations. While policy makers worldwide are attracted to these novel participatory processes, little consideration has been given to how well they work alongside more adversarial and interest-based politics. This doctoral research project examines this interface by studying what these processes mean to different kinds of policy actors such as corporations, advocacy groups, government agencies, experts and professionals. These entities are collectively referred to in this thesis as ‘interest organisations’ because in some way they are seeking a specific policy outcome from the state – even government-based groups.¶ The empirical research in this thesis is based on comparative case studies of four deliberative design projects in Australia and Germany. The Australian cases include a citizens’ jury on waste management legislation and a consensus conference on gene technology in the food chain. The German case studies include a planning cells project on consumer protection in Bavaria, and a national consensus conference on genetic diagnostics. Together the cases capture a diversity of complex and contested policy issues facing post-industrialised societies. In each case study, I examine how relevant interest organisations responded to the deliberative forum, and then interpret these responses in view of the context and features of the case.¶ The picture emerging from the in-depth case studies is that interest organisations respond to deliberative designs in a variety of ways. Some choose to participate actively, others passively decline, and a few resort to strategic tactics to undermine citizens’ deliberations. The empirical research reveals that though responses are variable, most interest organisations are challenged by several features of the deliberative design model including: 1) that deliberators are citizens with no knowledge or association with the issue; 2) that experts and interest representatives are required to present their arguments before a citizens’ panel; and 3) that policy discussions occur under deliberative conditions which can expose the illegitimate use of power.¶ Despite these challenges, the paradox is that many interest organisations do decide to engage in lay citizen deliberations. The empirical research indicates that groups and experts value deliberative designs if they present an opportunity for public relations, customer feedback, or advocacy. Moreover, the research finds that when policy actors intensively engage with ‘ordinary’ citizens, their technocratic and elite ideas about public participation can shift in a more inclusive and deliberative direction.¶ The thesis finds that, on the whole, weaker interest organisations are more willing to engage with lay citizens than stronger organisations because they welcome the chance to influence public debate and decision makers. It appears that powerful groups will only engage in a deliberative forum under certain policy conditions, for example, when the dominant policy paradigm is unstable and contested, when public discussion on the issue is emerging, when policy networks are interdependent and heterogeneous, and when the broader social and political system supports public accountability, consensus and deliberation. Given that these kinds of policy conditions do not always exist, I conclude that tensions between interest organisations and deliberative governance will be common. In order to create more cooperative and productive interfaces, I recommend that interest organisations be better supported and integrated into citizens’ deliberations, and that steps be taken to safeguard forums from strategic attempts to undermine their legitimacy.¶ The thesis also sends out three key messages to democratic theorists. First, the empirical research shows that different kinds of groups and actors in civil society vary in their willingness and capacity to participate to public deliberation. Second, the deliberative design model demonstrates that partisan actors, such as interest organisations, will engage in public deliberation when they can participate as strategic deliberators. In this role partisans are not expected to relinquish their agendas, but present them as testimonies before a group of deliberators. Third, the empirical research in this thesis should bring home to theorists that deliberative forums are closely linked to the discursive context within which they operate.