  Global deliberative democracy has had many proponents and even more critics. A fairly standard complaint is that the model fails to provide a specific institutional design which can be sought or realized under existing conditions. Moreover, deliberation is said to suffer from a lack of decisiveness. Voting mechanisms always allow for individuals to cast their preferences with the understanding that 50 per cent plus one vote wins the election. Deliberation provides no mechanism for groups to make definitive decisions, and talking until agreement (consensus) is reached is both time-consuming and potentially unrealizable. In terms of desirability, Eva Erman (2012) has argued that deliberative democrats do not take the notion of equality seriously enough, thus undermining a core ideal of democracy. It is difficult to envisage, Erman suggests, how individuals can have equal opportunity for deliberation in a world of inequality. Relatedly, the inclusion of non-state actors in formal IOs is often seen as a form of cooptation in which civil society actually works in subservience to (and thus legitimates) the established system. This line of criticism could be classified as a ‘governmentality’ critique in the tradition of Foucault. As such, there is a concern that including civil society in deliberation with formal sites of global decision-making exacerbates—rather than reduces—the global democratic deficit.