CONCEPT
Consultative Theater
Participatory mechanisms that perform the appearance of democratic inclusion without satisfying Fung's three conditions — the dominant mode of contemporary AI governance, and actively destructive rather than merely inadequate.
Consultative theater describes governance processes that adopt the forms of participation without the substance. Public comment periods on regulatory proposals, stakeholder engagement sessions convened by technology companies, town halls hosted by elected officials — each performs inclusion while satisfying at most one or two of Fung's three conditions. The theater is not harmless. It actively damages prospects for genuine participation by consuming attention, generating betrayed expectations, and inoculating institutions against future demands for real inclusion. It allows decision-makers to claim participation has been tried and found wanting, even though what was tried was not participation in any substantive sense.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The concept provides the evaluative counterpart to empowered participatory governance: where EPG names what participatory institutions should be, consultative theater names what they typically are. The distinction matters operationally because the two can be difficult to distinguish from outside. Both involve meetings, discussions, reports — the surface features are identical. The difference lies in whether the three conditions