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ASSEMBLIES: A PATH TO CO-GOVERNANCE AND DEMOCRATIC RENEWAL  
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Ben Palmquist
December 5, 2025
Convergence
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_ A hybrid model of assemblies may be the key to bringing in vast
numbers of people into the process of forging a new world and
governing the one we have. _

The oversight committee for the French National Convention on the End
of Life. , Federation for Innovation in Democracy

 

Democracy should give us a real say in the decisions that shape our
lives, but few people today feel the government is working for them.
Inequality is extreme, our economic lives are precarious, and trust in
government and all kinds of institutions is at historic lows. All this
has opened up space for the reactionary Right—at least in the last
election—to win over a multiracial majority of voters. As we defend
electoral democracy and organize our people, we also need to build new
democratic structures: ones that deepen people’s sense of
interdependence and solidarity, build real political and economic
democracy, and deliver palpable results that restore people’s faith
in collective public action and democratic governance.

Co-governance
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which government and communities collaborate and share power to solve
problems together, is one especially powerful approach to structural
change. And assemblies—gatherings in which larger numbers of people
come together across lines of difference to deliberate together and
make collective decisions—are important tools for co-governance.

[Assemblies] can help shift power away from organized elite interests
like real estate developers toward everyday people.

Assemblies are especially useful for facilitating participation of
large numbers of people and for addressing multifaceted “wicked
problems” around which multiple values and stakeholders are in
tension and for which there is no single resolution. With models to
learn from everywhere, from Bend, Oregon
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the Bronx
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Bogotá
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and Brussels [[link removed]], there is real
potential for movements, foundations, and local and state governments
to expand and strengthen the role of assemblies in public life as a
way to build authentic, effective, multiracial democracy from the
ground up.

Types of Assemblies

Assemblies vary a lot: they can be convened by community groups,
governments, or both. They can play an official role in governance or
sit entirely outside of the public realm. Assemblies can hold either
advisory or decision-making power. However they are structured,
assemblies can enable everyday people to draw on their values and
lived experiences as they work together to guide governments,
philanthropy, unions, and other institutions around what issues to
prioritize. These structures can help generate collaborative solutions
that balance multiple goals, build public support behind those
solutions, and hold government and other institutions accountable to
ensure their implementation.

Movement assemblies

Movement assemblies are convened by organizing groups to build
solidarity and the power to democratically govern their organizations
and coalitions. They are not just meetings: they are living
demonstrations of collective wisdom and solidarity. They build
leadership, deepen people’s commitment, and help participants,
organizations, and coalitions align around shared strategies.

I’ve experienced this firsthand as a participant in movement
assemblies with groups including It Takes Roots
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People’s Action [[link removed]], Put People First! PA
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[[link removed]]. As a guest at Put People First! PA’s
first annual membership assembly, I got to watch as the
organization’s members shared what they learned from months of
research and decided together to focus their statewide organizing on
healthcare as an issue around which they could unite poor and
dispossessed Pennsylvanians across lines of race and geography. It was
a beautiful and effective exercise in collective self-determination
that built organizational consensus and commitment, and that deepened
the skills, leadership, and relationships of everyone involved. I
walked away from that weekend a better organizer and strategist, and
with deep, enduring friendships and commitments to the movement that I
will hold dear for life.

Civic assemblies

Civic assemblies are another common form of assembly. They are
convened either by community groups or governments to solicit direct
public input on a single policy question, and they select participants
through a “civic lottery” that picks participants randomly but
balances them by key demographic attributes to mirror the larger
population of their jurisdiction.

Governments and organizations have held civic assemblies widely across
Latin America and Europe. In the US, civic groups including Healthy
Democracy, Central Oregon Civic Action Project, and CivicLex are
working with local governments through recently convened assemblies on
youth homelessness in Deschutes County, Oregon
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and on land use in Petaluma, California
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and in Fort Collins, Colorado
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Kentucky [[link removed]] will hold a civic
assembly on representation, trust, and civic participation. Civic
assemblies can be convened as one-time bodies or, as in Brussels
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Paris [[link removed]], and other cities, as
standing assemblies that play an ongoing role in government
policy-making and budgetary decisions every year.

Civic assemblies can also be a powerful experience for participants.
They are especially effective interventions for complex issues where
public opinion is polarized or where long-term, sustainable solutions
require broad public and stakeholder buy-in. Ireland famously convened
a civic assembly to deliberate on abortion policy
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a highly contentious issue in the heavily Catholic country. By
enabling everyday people to bring their many values and personal
experiences into the assembly and to deliberate around the
complexities and trade-offs, and by bringing those deliberations to
the broader public through an intentional media strategy, the assembly
built public support behind reproductive rights and led to a 2017
national referendum that legalized abortion. In the US, smaller-scale
assemblies have been held to provide governments with direction on
land use [[link removed]], legislative
redistricting
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artificial intelligence [[link removed]], and health care
delivery [[link removed]]. For
now, civic assemblies are more common in Europe (where they are
usually called _citizen assemblies_) and Latin America (where they are
often called _consultations_) than in the US, but there is real
potential to expand them here—especially standing assemblies, which
provide an ongoing, institutionalized mechanism for public
participation and power in governance.

Governing-Power Assemblies

To my mind, the most exciting assemblies today are experimenting with
how to combine movement assemblies’ commitment to power-building
with civic assemblies’ direct intervention in public governance. I
call these hybrid models _governing-power assemblies_. By linking
structured deliberation with civic organization and mobilization,
governing-power assemblies enable communities not only to _generate_
policy ideas, but also to collaborate with government and build the
inside-outside power needed to make them real.

Brazil
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a world leader in assemblies, offers an example of a hybrid model that
combines the best features of movement and civic assemblies. Through
multiple assembly models
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the government is coordinating with labor unions and community groups
to build federated assemblies that have involved millions of residents
and which provide direction and accountability to the federal, state,
and local governments on health, education, environment, science and
technology, rural development, minority rights, and other policy
arenas. A staggering seven million Brazilians participated
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in National Public Policy Conference assemblies from 2003 through
2011, for example, and in recent years the federal government has
launched new assembly processes and created a complementary digital
participation platform that has engaged 1.4 million people
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The assemblies and digital platform are complemented by a third
co-governance pillar: policy councils
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society and government representatives (sometimes industry
representatives too) that help establish priorities, guidelines, and
strategies for administrative governance and legislation.

Taken together, assemblies, digital participation, and policy councils
provide both everyday people and organized community and labor groups
with authentic channels of participation that have had real effects in
administrative and legislative changes
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that support public health, minoritized groups like elders and
Indigenous people, and other priorities identified by everyday
people. 

Power-building hybrid assemblies are also working in US cities. In
Jackson, Mississippi, a city rich in community but harmed by centuries
of racism, Black organizers with Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, New
Afrikan People’s Organization, People’s Advocacy Institute,
Mississippi Poor People’s Campaign, and One Voice Mississippi have
built the Jackson People’s Assembly
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local residents into direct democracy as they grow their leadership.
These leaders work to fix Jackson’s water system, cultivate
community safety, and build community power. In the Bronx, the
Bronx-wide Coalition
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assemblies for residents to collectively develop a vision for their
borough, to shape that into a plan, and to work with the Bronx’s
Borough President to co-develop the plan into an official economic
development strategy and proposal for a federal grant. In Washington
state, Just Futures
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from the state legislature to hold six community assemblies across the
state to solicit policy priorities and solutions from communities on
the frontlines of injustice.

Investing in Assemblies to Deepen Their Impacts

As these and many other examples
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show, assemblies are a highly proven model that should play a much
bigger role in democratic governance. In the US, the federal
government may not be ready to embrace assemblies anytime soon, but
state and local governments and their community partners absolutely
can. Assemblies that center equity and power can deliver durable
impact, provided they are institutionalized and sustained over time.

Both movement assemblies and civic assemblies are powerful democratic
tools that should be widely expanded to more places to bring together
diverse communities, address a wider range of issues, and find
creative people-centered solutions that are tangible and visible. But
one thing that assemblies of all kinds have struggled with is
deepening their impact on policy decisions and policy outcomes in ways
that make a meaningful difference in people’s lives.

[W]e can recognize and invest in organized, independent community
power as an essential part of a healthy democracy.

In learning about assemblies’ successes and shortcomings around the
world, I’ve come to realize that deepening their impact requires us
not just to facilitate fantastic assembly processes, but to work on
better institutionalizing them within larger structures of power and
governance. We should institutionalize assemblies across three
dimensions: _horizontally,_ across social movements to build civic
capacity and countervailing power; _vertically,_ within government to
build democratic participation and accountability (especially with
public agencies); and _longitudinally, _throughout the course of the
policy process to strategically inject participation at key junctures
stretching from agenda-setting through decision-making, implementation
and monitoring, and enforcement.

Institutionalizing assemblies and other co-governance mechanisms
across these dimensions helps movements build power and deliver wins
for their bases, while it helps governments reach beyond the usual
players and stalemates to engage directly impacted communities in
identifying the most pressing challenges and generating informed,
responsive, and effective policy solutions.

Organizers of movement and civic assemblies can strategize around
these dimensions, and governing-power assemblies offer opportunities
to pursue all three dimensions of institutionalization and impact at
once. Since assemblies take significant labor to plan, run, and
sustain, governments and foundations should invest in assemblies year
over year as foundational building blocks for a robust democracy.

Building Assemblies into Democratic Governance

Co-governance and assemblies aren’t about replacing elections,
policy-making, advocacy, or organizing: they’re about deepening
them. When designed, institutionalized, and funded intentionally,
assemblies can help diffuse reflexive polarization, foster solidarity,
and make room for compromise. They can help shift power away from
organized elite interests like real estate developers toward everyday
people. They can help governments focus on what matters most to their
constituents, produce better and fairer policies, and build channels
for accountability and trust that extend beyond elections. As I
discovered in Pennsylvania, assemblies can be a powerful experience
for everyone involved, by engaging people in civic action and building
the civic muscles we very much need.

Assemblies are not the only answer to the many challenges we face, but
they are a powerful and greatly underutilized tool in our democratic
toolbox; one that can generate solidarity across difference, repair
injustice, and uphold human dignity.

As I discuss in a recent report for Partners for Dignity & Rights
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number of things that organizers, advocates, foundations, elected
officials, and government agencies can do to expand and deepen
assemblies’ roles in public life. For example, we can build
partnerships between community organizations and government agencies,
doing the slow but crucial work of repairing harms, building trust,
and developing strong collaborative relationships. We can
strategically focus assemblies on issues like housing, health,
community safety, and well-being that resonate across partisan
divides. We can use intentional recruitment strategies, whether civic
lotteries or targeted recruitment, to ensure diversity and equitable
representation by people on the frontlines of policy problems. We can
secure government officials’ recognition of assemblies in policy
processes, institutionalize assemblies in governance processes, and
move assemblies along the spectrum
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from tokenistic input toward authentic community power and ownership.
And we can recognize and invest in organized, independent community
power as an essential part of a healthy democracy.

Organizing assemblies is not easy. Because of their size, assemblies
are time- and resource-intensive, and they face potential risks. They
can be co-opted by opponents of community power and people-centered
policy solutions, undermined by underfunding, or fall into the trap of
becoming yet another exercise in “community engagement” that
doesn’t give communities any power and doesn’t deliver results.
That’s why clear principles, strategic issue selection, careful
language, rigorous design, and training and support for participants
and government staff matter. In many locales, the best way to figure
out how to build political and financial support for assemblies and
how to design and run them effectively is to start small with a pilot
project, then use that to demonstrate results, make adjustments, and
build further support. 

Assemblies are not the only answer to the many challenges we face, but
they are a powerful and greatly underutilized tool in our democratic
toolbox; one that can generate solidarity across difference, repair
injustice, and uphold human dignity. It’s clear to everyone that our
political and economic systems aren’t working. For people who are
struggling to make ends meet in a rigged economy and political system,
calls to defend democracy or reject authoritarianism often fall flat.
We need new governance models that help restore people’s faith in
collective public action by bringing people together across
differences, developing actionable solutions, and delivering real,
tangible results. Assemblies can help get us there.

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Ben is a movement strategist and consultant. He works with community
and labor organizations and partners in government to help build
strategies, campaigns, policies, and collaborative governance
mechanisms that uphold human rights and give everyday people genuine,
equitable power in policy making, governance, and oversight of
government and private powers.

 

* Citizen Assemblies; Democracy;
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