UC EVENTS

Decolonising Deliberation: Experiments from Aotearoa New Zealand

In recent years, citizens’ assemblies have been increasingly employed around the world to enable community decision-making regarding the climate crisis. While this form of citizen deliberation offers much-needed resources for innovation, empowerment, and procedural legitimacy, it is also a quintessentially western style of collective decision-making. When travelling intact, its transnational importation thus risks being a form of neo-colonialism, by ignoring pre-existing Indigenous forms of deliberation and political authority, as well as reinforcing settler dominance through demographic overrepresentation and use of western logics and protocols. Several largely tauiwi (non-Maori) environmental groups, inspired by the call overseas for climate assemblies, have sought to implement such an initiative in Aotearoa New Zealand. Early in these advocacy efforts, Maori challenged these groups to attend to these risks of neo-colonialism, as well as the implications and obligations of creating an assembly in the context of Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi, 1840), which provides for non-Maori to self-govern (‘kawanatanga’) only in the context of unceded Maori sovereignty (‘tino rangatiratanga’).

One such group – Te Reo o Nga Tangata/The People Speak – has sought to actively respond to this challenge, and since 2020 have been learning and unlearning in order to meet it, as they collaborate with the leadership of one of the local iwi (nations) of the region, Ngati Toa, to design and implement a climate assembly that is “Te Tiriti-led.” Already, this has meant important adaptations, in both the pivot from national to expressly regional forum and the inauguration of an ongoing 'Talanoa' or Pasifika-style deliberative leaders' forum within which any given citizens' assembly might occur, to align with Maori modes of governance. Yet at every stage and in every decision, the predominance of western logics and protocols continues to challenge the process, and the capacity to “lash together” the “two hulls” of Maori and non-Maori within the collaboration and ultimate design remains an open question. This paper charts key challenges, tensions, and milestones of this process, the particular recalibrations of what ‘deliberation’ looks like when honouring Maori tino rangatiratanga is a core commitment, and the innovations and insights that emerge as a result.

This seminar will be chaired by Simon Niemeyer.