Based in Paris, Claudia Chwalisz leads the OECD’s work on innovative citizen participation, which explores how to bring public judgement to democracy to improve public decision making, and how to strengthen society’s democratic fitness. Claudia is the lead author of the first OECD report on deliberative democracy: Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave (2020; co-authored with Ieva Cesnulaityte), and she led the development of the OECD Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes. She co-ordinates the OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Network of leading international practitioners, academics, public servants, artists, and designers, and she edits the OECD’s online digest Participo. Claudia was part of the small group of experts who designed the Ostbelgien Citizens’ Council, the world’s first permanent deliberative body made up of people drawn by civic lottery. The Citizens’ Council has an agenda-setting role and complements the parliament. She is on the Advisory Board of the Federation for Innovation in Democracy Europe (FIDE), a non-profit organisation dedicated to the participation of everyday citizens in policy making through deliberative democratic methods and civic lotteries. She is also a member of the Democracy R&D Network. In December 2019, Claudia was a Distinguished International Visitor at the Centre for Deliberative Democracy & Global Governance, University of Canberra. On the sidelines of the 2019 UN Economic and Social Council ministerial meetings, she moderated a discussion with the UN Deputy Secretary General hosted by UNDEF about Democracy and the Sustainable Development Goals. She also contributed to Carnegie Europe’s Reshaping European Democracy Project and she mentored the 2019 Social Design masters students at the Design Academy Eindhoven for a series of workshops about Designing Democracy 2050. Claudia’s work has been featured in Nature, Science, Le Monde, ARTE, The BBC, Politico, The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Globe and Mail, The Independent and others. Before the OECD, Claudia was a strategy consultant working with political parties and campaigns at Populus in London. Prior to that, she led Policy Network’s work on populism, democracy, and political economy. In 2016-7, she received a Public Service Fellowship from the Crick Centre for the Public Understanding of Politics to write The People’s Verdict: Adding Informed Citizen Voices to Public Decision-making. (from www.claudiachwalisz.com/)
