The Mostar Citizens’ Assembly: Bridging diversity and division in Bosnia and Herzegovina
The Mostar Citizen’s Assembly — the first deliberative process in Bosnia and Herzegovina and in Southeast Europe — resulted from an initiative by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe to promote local democracy in Mostar and was nominated for the Democracy Innovation Award at the World Forum for Democracy in Strasbourg in 2022.
In 2020, Mostar had gone without local elections for over 12 years because of a political gridlock where party leaders from different ethnic groups could not agree on necessary electoral reforms. The aim was to give citizens a different opportunity to participate in local decision making through a deliberative process.
In addition, Mostar faces ethnic divisions that are salient in local politics and that needed to be addressed in the assembly design. By the time the assembly started, Mostar had held elections and the process was co-convened by the Municipality and the Council of Europe. This also meant that assembly members could address their recommendations to the newly elected officials.
Co-deciding the Assembly’s topic.
As the city administration faced many unaddressed issues, a participatory approach was adopted to select the topic. This included citizens, and representatives from civil society and the local authority. As a first step in Spring 2021, through an online poll, all Mostar residents were invited to propose a topic that fell under the competences of the City. Similar responses were grouped into 69 different topics by the contracted polling agency and then ranked by recurrence (number of times suggested). The top twenty were presented to a group of civil society who prioritise six topics then presented to the City Council members and local authorities who in their turn selected three. The final choice was given to randomly selected citizens who when registering for the assembly could also vote for one of the three topics.
The topic of city cleanliness and public spaces came out on top throughout the process and was ultimately selected. The remit was phrased: How can the city improve the cleanliness of public spaces and make them more pleasant?
The Mostar Citizen’s Assembly
For six days in July 2021, over the course of four weekends, 48 randomly selected citizens learned, deliberated, and agreed on a set of recommendations addressed to city officials. The Council of Europe implemented the process with support from Mostar’s local administration, as well as international and local experts.
5000 invitation letters containing registration codes were sent out to randomly selected households throughout the city, matching the population distribution. Interested citizens signed up with their registration code and the response rate was 5%. From the resulting database, two stratified random samples were generated considering six criteria to ensure diverse representation: gender, age, education, employment status, ethnicity, and city district residency. Ethnicity is a key criterion that needed to be mirrored as closely as possible. Mostar is a divided city where ethnic identity was responsible for violence in the 1990s war, and for the more recent political gridlock.
The Assembly consisted of 40 members with voting rights and 8 reserve members who participated equally in the process but didn’t vote on the recommendations. As one member cancelled before the start of the process, the final number of participants was 47. All participants were remunerated for taking part in the Assembly and there were no dropouts when the process started.
During the first weekend participants got to know each other, learned about principles of deliberation, and about the topic from experts and practitioners. They discussed the inputs received and jointly formulated questions. During the second weekend they continued to hear about best practices and learned from the City administration and public companies. After the learning stage, the Assembly deliberated extensively and identified key issues and challenges that needed to be addressed. They also requested additional information on the issues raised during the deliberation stage.
During the third weekend, they continued deliberating and drafted initial recommendations which were shared with to the city councillors and local administration for comments. During the fourth weekend the Assembly engaged with civil servants and local councillors and proceeded to finalize the recommendations and vote them.
The final document included 32 recommendations addressing issues of waste management, public green spaces, environmental education, as well as reform of public companies and services. The Assembly called to reconvey deliberative processes and institutionalize such practices.
Transparency is key to promote trust in the process.
Later that year, in November 2021, the Mostar City Council adopted an action plan that set a roadmap to implement all 32 recommendations. The status of implementation on each of the recommendations is being tracked through the process website that still serves as a comprehensive resource of documents and videos. As of today, over a third of recommendations have been largely implemented, while another third are at an early to mid-stage of implementation. This kind of transparency is especially relevant in an environment with low levels of trust. It also helped communicate with the wider audience bridging the mini-public with Mostar’s broader population.
Deliberation in difficult environments requires careful design.
Several elements make the Mostar Citizens Assembly stand out in comparison to other deliberative processes. The Assembly was held in an ethnically diverse society with low levels of interpersonal and institutional trust, in a city that experienced heavy intercommunal fighting during the Bosnian war in the 1990s and that still suffers from a strongly divided post-conflict environment.
All these challenges made the design and implementation more complex. Particular attention was given to inclusiveness in the design and facilitation of the process. Certain elements that could highlight identity differences among Assembly members were avoided. Citizens took their role and responsibility very serious when it came to respecting diversity, for example by sharing diverse opinions when it was beneficial but not when it was detrimental to deliberation. Additionally, participants made sure to have ethnic diversity among spokespersons without facilitators or organizers putting emphasis on this.
The Mostar Citizen Assembly showed that deliberation in extremely difficult environments with low levels of trust is possible and that it can produce very valuable outcomes. For example, an older male Assembly member who was a vocal skeptic of the deliberative processes during the first day became a strong supporter and presented some of the recommendations to the mayor. A young female Assembly member emphasized that she liked how everyone participated as equals and worked together, suggesting that more young people should take part in such projects and learn to work together. Ultimately citizens made decisions that were in the common interest of all, and not only of a particular group. A survey conducted as part of the process showed the importance of transparency and random sortition, as well as strong public support for unanimously adopted recommendations, even if they are not in line with respondents’ personal beliefs. Two thirds of surveyed citizens would participate in a future assembly.
To make a Citizen Assembly work it is important to adapt the design of the process to the context it will be set in.
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This article reflects the views and opinions of the author and does not represent those of the OECD or its member countries.
Damir Kapidžić is an Associate Professor of Comparative Politics at the University of Sarajevo and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University. He is a consultant on deliberative processes for the Council of Europe, a member of the Balkans in Europe Policy Advisory Group, and editor of the book ‘Illiberal Politics in Southeast Europe’ published by Routledge in 2022.
