Palaver
AI governance processes are typically enacted in the style and format of laws and regulations. Many of these instruments are drafted by an elite group, typically people in positions of political, economic, and social power. In many instances, communities are “consulted,” but only after key decisions are made, or the direction for progress is already determined. The inputs emerging from these consultations are rarely accounted for in meaningful ways. Palaver offers a way to change this frame of engagement to one that prioritizes every voice that matters as critical to the journey, rather than treating them as an afterthought.
Before proceeding, we want to acknowledge that Palaver is not a single, unified tradition, but a family of related forms of community deliberation and conflict resolution practices across West and Central Africa. Each tradition has its own name, protocol, and spiritual grounding. The word “palaver” itself is a colonial imposition. We use the term here only to reference the most widely recognized frame for this family of practices, while also explicitly naming and acknowledging that it carries a colonial etymology and that the communities that practice these traditions use their own names for them that hold greater authority. Palaver has also been recognized and incorporated into colonial administrations, but not without flattening and freezing living and adaptive practices. It used the appearance of cultural continuity to consolidate colonial control. This ambivalent relationship continues in post-colonial states as well. We draw on the philosophical and ethical core of the tradition and acknowledge the institutional history that has been shaped by all these pressures. We hold this tension throughout this piece and welcome correction.
Understanding Palaver
The word “palaver” comes from “palavra,” the Portuguese term meaning word or speech. This word has been used since the 1400s onward, to describe the West African custom of oral deliberation and consensus-building that the Portuguese encountered in their coastal contacts. The practice itself, however, was far older, and much richer than their description of it suggested. The practice is common across West and Central Africa, among the Igbo and Yoruba in Nigeria, the BaKongo and Fang in Central Africa, the Shona in Zimbabwe, and communities across Liberia where palaver halls are maintained. It brings community members together under a tree for open-ended, inclusive discussion aimed not at producing winners and losers, but rather at restoring peace and social harmony while taking care to repair the relationship. Palaver moves away from adversarial negotiations, and instead, centres truth-seeking and repair from rupture. The key goal is to find out what is true, so that the trust and unity that is broken within the community is meaningfully restored.
At its core, the palaver emphasizes oral negotiation, the participation of elders and women, and truth-telling as the precondition for social restoration. The system is not informal governance, but rather a meaningfully created, deeply rooted moral and social institution reflecting African ontologies of personhood, community, and justice.
What Palaver unsettles in AI Governance
Contemporary AI governance processes claim to be participatory. They hold consultations, invite public comments, convene multi-stakeholder forums, and publish draft frameworks for inputs, but these processes structurally resemble adversarial or technocratic deliberation. They have agendas set in advance by those with institutional power, not involving the communities affected by this institutional show of power. They have time limits that disadvantage those who need to speak at length. They treat testimony as input to be processed rather than truth to be honored. They produce outputs whose relationship to the inputs is opaque. They do not always create space for the kind of extended, open-ended, community-centered truth-telling that palaver describes.
The palaver’s insistence that the process is at the service of communion, in that its purpose is the restoration of broken relationships and not the apportionment or assignment of liability, is especially important for AI governance’s accountability mechanisms. Current frameworks deal with AI harm primarily through liability, fines, and compliance obligations. None of these restore the relationship between an affected community and the institution whose systems caused harm. They do not create the conditions for the kind of truth-telling that palaver calls for: a public acknowledgment of what happened, why, and what the harm meant to those who experienced it. Palaver suggests that meaningful accountability requires this dimension.
Scholars working on deliberative democracy in Africa have argued that palaver offers a practical, inclusive, and consensus-building model for governance applicable across modern contexts. Applied to AI governance, this model would mean designing deliberative processes that center reconciliation over compliance; that require extended, unstructured time for affected communities to speak; that include community elders, women, and representatives of marginalized groups not as consultees but as co-conveners; and that measure their success not by the production of a policy document but by whether trust and relationship between communities and institutions have been restored.
References
ACCORD. (2025). The Palaver Tree and the Notions of National Tribunal and Republican Confessional. Conflict Trends. https://www.accord.org.za/conflict-trends/the-palaver-tree-and-the-notions-of-national-tribunal-and-republican-confessional/
DemocracyNext. (2026). Deliberative Democracy in Africa: Learning from Past Practices. https://www.demnext.org/action/deliberative-democracy-in-africa
Kiyala, J. C. K. (2024). Using traditional African approaches in contemporary peacebuilding. In The Elgar companion to war, conflict and peacebuilding in Africa (pp. 44-79). Edward Elgar Publishing.
Penoukou, E.J.B. (1994). Eglises d’Afrique: Propositions pour l’avenir. Karthala.
Scheid, A. F. (2011). Under the palaver tree: Community ethics for truth-telling and reconciliation. Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics, 17-36.
This article draws from the wisdom and work of people across West and Central Africa. While educating ourselves on Indigenous worldviews is important, we understand that our actions can also contribute to and enable appropriation. As part of our ongoing attempts at practicing accountability, we invite readers to consider donating to Indigenous groups, collectives, organizations, or initiatives to support their lives and work.
