From deliberation to real impact - Diagnosis and strengthening of the deliberative model
02/Session
Vanessa González Ratsch
Ciudadanía Inteligente.
She is a political and social scientist from the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. She currently serves as Coordinator of Processes and Strategic Planning at Fundación Ciudadanía Inteligente, where she has worked since 2018 strengthening democracy, citizen participation, and transparency across Latin America. She has coordinated public innovation and open government projects with municipalities and civil society organizations in Chile, Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, and Ecuador, with a focus on deliberative practices, situated advocacy, and local capacity building.
Fundación Ciudadanía Inteligente – ciudadaniai.org is a Latin American, non-profit organization that for more than 16 years has worked to make democracy a shared, fair, and transformative experience. Amid growing democratic backsliding, we support citizens in defending and expanding democratic spaces, promoting a politics that listens, includes, and puts the wellbeing of people and the planet at the center.
How can deliberation turn into real institutional power?
This session moves the conversation from why deliberation matters to how it survives contact with real institutions. It examines the shared structural challenges deliberative processes face across different contexts, how citizens, government, media, and civil society act as interdependent “gears” of a functioning democratic system, and how diagnostic tools (root-cause analysis, user personas, qualitative listening) can be used to design deliberative processes that are grounded in real local conditions rather than assumptions. It closes by asking what resilience means for organizations sustaining this work over time.
From deliberation to real impact - Diagnosis and strengthening of the deliberative model
Second open session of the Demo.Reset Mentorship Program, led by Vanessa González (Fundación Ciudadanía Inteligente, Chile). Building on the idea that deliberation does not begin when people speak, the session walks through a practical framework built on strategic outreach, meaningful experience, and sustainability, so organizations from the Global South can design deliberative processes that reach the right people, earn their trust, and endure over time.
Identify the internal and external factors shaping deliberative scenarios into concrete actions that strengthen sustainability and local advocacy capacity.
- 0:00 - Design and Methodologies for Deliberation spaces
- 7:13 - From participation to impact: deliberation design
- 8:04 - Stage zero: identifying issues through the public policy cycle
- 11:34 - Effective outreach, part 1: who to invite?
- 19:03 - Effective outreach, part 2: how to invite?
- 64:56 From reach to retention: introducing relevance and trust
- 65:37 - Case study | Municipality of Peñalolén: rebuilding trust in environmental participation
- 78:23 - Where relevance comes in: connecting outreach to people's real priorities4703s 78:23 Where relevance comes in: connecting outreach to people's real priorities
- 80:16 - The three levels of trust: space, process, and results
- 91:19 - Building a lasting decision-making infrastructure
- 98:12 - Sustaining youth participation without formal government commitment