The administrative portion of the Nineteen Day Feast is where the Baha'i principle of consultation, a deliberately non-adversarial method of collective decision making, is exercised at the most local level of community life. Baha'is present, who must be registered members of the community holding the feast, raise questions, offer views, and bring proposals before the Local Spiritual Assembly, the elected body that administers Baha'i affairs in that locality, which is expected to weigh the feast's discussion even though it retains final decision making authority between feasts. The exercise is framed within Baha'i teaching as training in a mode of discourse meant to seek the truth of a matter collectively rather than to win an argument.
Because attendance at the devotional and administrative portions is restricted to Baha'is, the feast functions differently from Baha'i holy days such as Ridvan or the Declaration of the Bab, which typically include a public dimension; the Nineteen Day Feast is, by design, an internal institution, and its regularity, recurring every nineteen days without exception across the Baha'i world, is treated within the community as central to sustaining both its spiritual discipline and its practical self-governance between the less frequent major holy days.