Beyond Inclusion: Recognising Self-Determined Deliberative Spaces

Aunty Tracey Evans and Emanuela Savini Deliberative democracy presents itself as an emancipatory project, yet the field is reckoning with the possibility that it reproduces the colonial logics it claims to disrupt. Central to this reckoning is the inclusion paradigm, which positions reform as incorporating historically excluded voices into existing structures. First Nations peoples must perform colonially-legible forms of participation while underlying power arrangements remain intact: what Watego (2021) terms the ‘violence of inclusion’. The field has responded by asking whether deliberative democracy can be decolonised. We take a different route. That question keeps deliberative democracy at the centre as the institution to be repaired, directing attention away from the deliberative spaces First Nations peoples have already designed and are already directing. This paper asks what becomes visible when First Nations participation is treated not as something to be enabled by reformed settler institutions, but as already underway in institutions of their own design. We call these self-determined deliberative spaces: designed by First Nations communities, legitimated on their own terms, and governed through their own protocols and lines of accountability. We develop this argument through the Victorian First Peoples’ Assembly, whose negotiations with the Victorian Government rest on cultural legitimacy, Traditional Owner authority and democratic mandate. Through collaborative analysis centring Aunty Tracey Evans’ knowledge and lived experience as an elected Assembly member, we examine the premises such a space operates from and how these differ from conventional deliberative design. The paper contributes to scholarship interrogating Western-centred democratic innovation, with implications for other historically excluded groups.