Assembly Blog and News

In early 2026, we opened a competitive call for facilitators to join the Cape Town Assembly on Climate. We were looking for people with experience in community dialogue and facilitation, a commitment to multilingual and inclusive practice, and a genuine connection to the communities of Cape Town. The response exceeded our expectations.

From a strong pool of applicants, fifteen facilitators were selected to make up our facilitation team. The team reflects the diversity of Cape Town itself: they come from different neighbourhoods, speak different home languages, and bring different professional and community backgrounds. That diversity is not incidental. It is central to what makes the assembly work.

In May 2026, the facilitation team came together at UWC for a two-day intensive training programme planned and hosted by our core organising team and facilitation lead, with expert support from the NNI Dialogue Institute. The training covered the theory and practice of deliberative facilitation, the citizens’ assembly process and methodology, climate and transport content knowledge, and practical skills for working across languages and facilitating difficult conversations.

We also ran a mock assembly session during training, allowing facilitators to practise their skills and identify areas for refinement before the real sessions begin in August. The energy in the room during that mock assembly gave us enormous confidence in what this team will be able to create.

The facilitation team is the backbone of the assembly. The quality of deliberation that 100 Capetonians experience will depend directly on the skill, care, and creativity with which this team holds the space. We are grateful to each of them.

On 23 May 2026, we held a full mock assembly at the UWC School of Public Health in Bellville. This was our chance to test the process design in real conditions, with real facilitators, before the assembly itself begins in August.

The mock assembly brought together the facilitation team and a small group of volunteer participants to run through a compressed version of the assembly process. We used the actual assembly question on transport and climate and tested each element of the process: the expert presentation format, the small-group deliberation structure, the plenary reporting-back, and the multilingual logistics.

The UWC School of Public Health proved an excellent venue. The seminar rooms are well-suited to the small group work that is central to the deliberation process, and the building is accessible by MyCiTi and other public transport links, which matters enormously for an assembly about transport equity.

The mock assembly surfaced a number of useful refinements. We adjusted the timing of small group discussions, revised how we introduce the assembly question to new participants, and refined the translation logistics to ensure that participants who prefer isiXhosa are not disadvantaged in any phase of the process.

Most importantly, the mock assembly confirmed what we had hoped: the process works. Participants who came in with very different levels of knowledge about transport and climate left with a much deeper understanding of the issues, and with a genuine sense of having deliberated together. That is exactly what we want to replicate at scale in August.

In October 2025, Fiona Anciano and Kira Alberts travelled to Banjul, The Gambia, for a DemocracyNext convening on deliberative democracy in Africa. The trip combined two significant experiences: observing the Kerewan citizens’ assembly in the North Bank Region, and participating in a continental gathering of practitioners, researchers, and funders working on democratic innovation across Africa.

The Kerewan assembly was a remarkable thing to witness. Thirty randomly selected community members from across the North Bank Region came together to deliberate on a question about land restoration and economic livelihoods. The assembly was conducted in local languages, facilitated by a team trained by DemocracyNext and Shared Future, and grounded in the community’s own deep knowledge of its land and environment.

Watching the Kerewan assembly reinforced something we had known in theory but now understood experientially: sortition and deliberation work across contexts. The specific cultural and linguistic form that a citizens’ assembly takes will differ, but the core dynamic, bringing together randomly selected people who would otherwise never share a table and watching them reason carefully together, is powerful wherever it happens.

The DemocracyNext convening brought together practitioners and researchers from The Gambia, Kenya, Senegal, Nigeria, Morocco, and South Africa. Over two days, the group explored what deliberative democracy means in African contexts, what has been tried, what has worked, and what the path forward looks like for building a continental community of practice.

We came back from Banjul with new connections, new ideas, and a stronger conviction that the work we are doing in Cape Town matters not just locally but as part of a growing African movement for more participatory and deliberative democracy.

Read more about the Kerewan assembly →
Read the Banjul convening report →

Our team contributed to a significant new research paper published by DemocracyNext in 2025: Deliberative Democracy in Africa: Learning from Past Citizens’ Assemblies and Guidance for Future Action. The paper draws on real-world experiences of citizens’ assemblies and other deliberative innovations across the African continent.

Africa faces what the paper describes as a democratic paradox. Most people across the continent continue to support democratic institutions in principle, even as satisfaction with those institutions’ ability to deliver inclusive economic prosperity and accountable governance continues to decline. Deliberative innovations like citizens’ assemblies offer one part of the response to this paradox.

The paper explores how the design of citizens’ assemblies must be adapted to African contexts: the role of local languages and oral traditions in deliberation, the importance of grounding sortition in community trust, the relationship between formal democratic institutions and informal community governance, and the particular opportunities that African contexts offer for participatory innovation.

The Cape Town Assembly on Climate is featured in the paper as an example of how this work is developing in South Africa. We are proud to be part of a growing continental research and practice community, and committed to ensuring that our findings from this assembly contribute to the broader body of knowledge on deliberative democracy in Africa.

Read the full paper and executive summary →