Spanish nonprofit that recruits and selects participants by civic lottery for the European Citizens' Panels, trains the national network of recruiters, and campaigns to bring deliberative democracy into common sense.
Marea Deliberativa was formally constituted as a non-profit association in June 2022, growing out of an informal promoter group. It works so that deliberative democracy, and civic lottery in particular, become an ordinary way of making public decisions in Spain. Since July 2024 it recruits and selects the Spanish participants of the European Citizens' Panels by civic lottery, on assignment from the consortium led by the Sortition Foundation, with a commitment running to 2029. Across three panel editions it sortitioned and visited 36 localities, registered 299 people and confirmed 37 participants. For the 2026 Democratic Resilience panel the team knocked on more than 3,000 doors across 24 stratified localities. Marea also trains and coordinates the national network of door-to-door recruiters, transferring a sortition methodology it applies and teaches but did not author. Earlier work: the Democracia por el Clima campaign (2022-2023) coordinated a joint manifesto of 19 organisations calling for a Spanish ecological state pact. Democracia y Energia (2023) was its only end-to-end process, designed and run in-house: a self-selected popular assembly of 15 participants, not a civic lottery. Marea is a co-promoter of the Manifesto for the Expansion of Democracy and an observer entity at the Spanish Open Government Forum. People can help by joining the recruiter network for upcoming European Citizens' Panels, or by writing to [email protected].
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