Nordic Deliberation

The Nordic democracies excel in resilience when you look at international democracy metrics. Parallels in democratic systems and culture, as well as welfare models, provide a common basis for robust democracies. At the same time, Nordic societies face complex challenges and democracies are experiencing declining trust and participation.

This development has given way to a rapid growth of deliberative democracy and democracy innovation in the Nordics and the rest of the world. The goal is to reduce the gap between citizens and the political system, ensure robust and vibrant democracies, and accelerate the Nordic deliberative wave for a better democratic future. In 2024, leading players in the Nordic deliberative democracy sector gathered around one idea: Can we create a Nordic partnership that can become a hub and collaboration platform for the Nordic democracy sector?

With a shared ambition to strengthen Nordic democracies, four leading Nordic democracy actors founded the Nordic Deliberation partnership in 2024: We Do Democracy in Denmark, Sitra in Finland, Digidem Lab in Sweden and SoCentral in Norway.

The partnership aims to ensure vibrant and robust developing Nordic democracies through systematic collaborations on democratic innovation. The partnership will ensure a strong democracy sector in the Nordic region and inspire the rest of the world on how to build regional cooperation for the benefit of democracies.

Nordic Deliberation is united with the goal of being the central point of contact for the democracy sector in the Nordic countries. We are a collaboration platform and a development community that creates a framework for cross-cutting conversations on democracy development for politicians, public and private actors.

At the same time, as a working community, we have the knowledge and capacity to take on large-scale deliberative projects, develop capacity building of the public and private democracy sector as well as a methodological knowledge bank for best practice in organization, design, facilitation and impact for deliberative democracy in the Nordic context.

Since its founding, Nordic Deliberation has put the Nordic region on the world map as a deliberative beacon.

We have created an international learning space with Nordic Deliberation Learning Calls, where we invite collaborators and the curious to join thematic conversations on democratic innovation. We set new standards and open doors for cross-regional democracy collaborations by driving a focused initiative at the annual Democracy R&D conference. We lead the way and refine methodology by collaborating on large-scale deliberative processes, like the Norwegian citizen’s assemblies Norwegian Citizen’s Assembly on Sustainable Consumption and The Citizen’s Assembly for Norway’s Future.

Our ambition is to continue developing vibrant and robust democracy in the Nordics – and we believe that good solutions are found in regional partnerships.