Claudia Chwalisz
Founder and Chief Executive Officer
Claudia Chwalisz is the Founder and CEO of DemocracyNext.
Previously, she set up and led the OECD’s work on Innovative Citizen Participation - establishing an evidence base of ~600 examples of citizens’ assemblies, setting standards for implementation, and establishing guidelines for institutionalisation. She co-authored the OECD’s flagship report Innovative Citizen Participation and New Democratic Institutions: Catching the Deliberative Wave and led the development of the OECD Good Practice Principles for Deliberative Processes. She oversaw the development of the OECD Evaluation Guidelines for Representative Deliberative Processes (2021) and wrote the OECD paper on Eight Ways to Institutionalise Deliberative Democracy (2021). She co-ordinated the OECD Innovative Citizen Participation Network, and edited the OECD blog Participo.
Claudia's work at the OECD also involved managing five pilot projects of citizen participation in cohesion policy, supported by the European Commission, advice on institutionalising deliberative democracy in the Basque Country, as well as designing deliberative processes in Finland and Lebanon.
Claudia was involved in designing the Paris Citizens’ Assembly, as well as the Ostbelgien Citizens’ Council, the world’s first permanent deliberative body made up of people drawn by lottery, and the permanent Citizens’ Assembly for Climate in Brussels.
She is the author of The People's Verdict: Adding Informed Citizen Voices to Public Decision Making (2017) and The Populist Signal: Why Politics and Democracy Need to Change (2015).
She is one of the 2023 Obama Leaders in Europe.
