A Citizens Track on AI Governance: Agency, Alignment & Accountability
Year: 2026
Type: report
Abstract: People across the world affected by rapid AI developments must be engaged in meaningfully shaping decisions about its future, otherwise efforts towards both AI deployment and AI governance will lack legitimacy and risk public backlash. A commitment is needed to embed public participation into the architecture of AI governance. This will link bottom-up capacity building and deliberation with top-down global fora: driving more responsive and inclusive governance decisions while mobilising local communities as allies for governance reform and action. The citizens’ track is a mechanism to do this: listening to, connecting with, and embedding spaces for public voice from around the world. On current trajectories, AI risks being misaligned with public interest, human rights, sustainable development and safety. Despite substantial benefits and harms of AI already being experienced, evidence frequently lags impacts and fails to represent much of the world's population. To date, AI governance fora have excluded much of the globe, and AI-related hopes and fears of affected communities have been given little space. However, the evidence is clear that participatory processes can successfully bring people into high-stakes, highly technical, global governance discussions. Inclusive models demonstrate that participation builds deep public legitimacy, cuts through geopolitical and corporate gridlock, increases resilience to capture, and ensures that the communities most impacted by systemic transformation have a direct hand in shaping guardrails and goals. The new UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance, and the 2027 edition of the AI Summit Series in Geneva, Switzerland provide key moments where the current trajectory can be reversed. By leveraging recent developments in participatory democracy, and tapping into a growing network of national, local and grassroots groups organising participatory processes on AI, power-holders in AI governance can create the conditions to build legitimacy into AI. Drawing on learning from the field of climate governance, and a new case book describing participatory AI governance processes from every continent, this report sets out a power-aware theory of change for public participation, which is able to deliver public interest alignment, public agency and increased accountability.
Institutions: University of Sheffield, The Ada Lovelace Institute
Language: English
Subfield: Safety Research
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7167408692