Democratic inclusion and lifelong learning in a globalising world

Abstract

Democratic deliberation is a form of lifelong learning that develops capacities for genuine inclusion, especially under conditions of diversity, inequality and nascent democratic institutions and procedures. In an earlier exploration of deliberative democracy as enabling democratic inclusion (Enslin et al. 2001), we considered conceptions of deliberation, suggesting a construal of lifelong learning to meet their demands. Although we will briefly revisit this earlier work, in the present chapter our interest in democratic inclusion shifts from an implicitly assumed context of the nation state to probe the implications of globalisation for democratic inclusion and lifelong learning. These are considerable.