Are there trade-offs in EDD between efficacy and empowerment?
In our elaboration of the EDD model we claim, in effect, that deliberative processes in popular democratic participation accomplish two things: 1) they improve the quality of the decisions that are made because deliberation can mobilize impacted information, induce parties to recast problems, discover latent common interests, and generate innovative solutions in contexts otherwise filled with conflicting interests and defensive behavior, and 2) these processes also enhance the empowerment itself via cynicism reduction, solidarity formation, etc. An issue we have not discussed is the extent to which there may be a trade-off here: does the process which sustainably produces the best policy outcomes (problem-solving efficacy) also reinforce empowerment in the most sustainable manner? In the settings of the case studies we have examined we think a case could be made that this is true – especially in the Brazil & Kerela cases – but clearly this is not invariably the case. In the more functi
