Arantxa Mendiharat was relatively new to the field of deliberative democracy when this was recorded in May 2019. She was also involved with an exciting project in Madrid that she helped design and implement — a combination of direct and deliberative democracy that was written into the city’s laws.
Arantxa has gained a great deal of experience and knowledge since then and plays a significant role in the international network, Democracy R&D, as well as establishing, with others, a new NGO in Spain, Deliberativa (in Spanish only).
Links
- newDemocracy R&D Note: Learnings from Madrid: Institutionalising deliberative democracy through its Observatorio de la Ciudad
Arantxa Mendiharat works in the cultural field, designing and managing arts projects, and in the field of deliberative processes, mainly doing advocacy.
She is co-founder of Deliberativa, an organisation that helps engaging citizens through deliberative processes, of democraciaporsorteo.org, a website aiming at disseminating in Spain the idea of deliberative democracy, and is part of Democracy R&D, an international network of practitioners, academic and civil servants pioneers in that field. She publishes in 2020 a book written with Ernesto Ganuza “La democracia es posible. Sorteo cívico y deliberación para rescartar el poder de la ciudadanía”, edited by Consonni.
Graduated in Political Science from Bordeaux University (France), she holds a MSc in Arts Management from Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh (GB). She lives in Bilbao (Spain).
Music acknowledgement.
