No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
A review of National Citizens’ Climate Assemblies: learning from deliberative events
Climate Policy
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
Governments around the world are experimenting with deliberative mini-publics as a means of integrating public input into policymaking processes, including as a method for directly creating policy. This raises the important question of when ordinary people will judge the outputs of mini-publics to be legitimate and support their use. We investigate how public support for mini-publics is shaped by: (1) whether the mini-public is held in response to calls from politicians or from the general public; (2) which political party sets up the mini-public; and (3) whether there is partisan conflict surrounding the mini-public's creation. To do so, we use two pre-registered survey experiments fielded in the United Kingdom that focus on climate assemblies, a prominent form of deliberative mini-public. Results are three-fold. First, we find some evidence that assemblies are more positively evaluated when they stem from the demands of local residents rather than partisan actors, but this effect is relatively modest and does not emerge consistently across our analyses. Similar findings are noted with regard to partisanship. Partisan conflict, by contrast, has a more robust effect – leading respondents to adopt more ideologically stereotypical views of the assembly, with left-wing (right-wing) respondents being more supportive of Labour-sponsored (Conservative-sponsored) assemblies.
This paper presents school climate assemblies, conceived as an innovative educational tool for the co-creation of climate change and sustainability solutions in educational institutions and communities. It describes an intervention research project that builds on previous processes and experiences of climate citizen assemblies which have been organised in different countries across the world. School climate assemblies are conceived of as a tool that promotes the active engagement of pupils and their communities in co-creating climate change mitigation and adaptation strategies towards jointly defining innovative sustainability and climate change solutions. An intervention, piloted in five secondary schools in the Spanish region of Tarragona, is reported, presenting the main phases and steps followed. To test the effectiveness of the intervention, this paper outlines the policy climate change recommendations that emerged from the co-creation process to identify and agree on a set of actions to tackle climate change and sustainability challenges and the degree of student satisfaction with the intervention. A detailed methodology for organising school climate assemblies that can be replicated in other educational institutions, contexts and regions, is presented, enabling the widespread adoption of this innovative approach. The study emphasises the potential of co-creation methods in the educational context and underscores the critical role of education in fostering sustainability in citizens and empowering students to become active change agents in their local communities. The results lead to policy implications for integrating co-creation approaches into school curricula worldwide, aiming to empower students and drive sustainability action.
Researcher, Climate Outreach Briony Latter, PhD researcher, Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations, Cardiff University. November 2021 KNOCA is a European network that aims to provide resources and inspire those who commission, design, advocate and scrutinise climate assemblies to ensure the highest standards of practice. The network hosts events and produces a range of practical resources, alongside other knowledge development activities. We welcome individuals and organisations with experience or interest in either commissioning, running or analysing these processes and their outputs in Europe. Please reach out to us at info@knoca.eu to share, discuss and inform best practice and new developments in climate assembly design, delivery and analysis.
KNOCA website: https://www.knoca.eu/news/impact-evaluation-of-spanish-citizens-climate-assembly-published
'Unlike most evaluations which tend to focus on the design and immediate response to the assembly, this report offers analyses of longer-term effects.
The evaluation takes inspiration from the KNOCA Impact Evaluation Framework, focusing on the assembly’s impact on policy, assembly members, general public, and digital and social media.
The main findings are:
- Limited evidence of implementation of recommendations and a lack of transparent reporting by government.
- Assembly members remain positive about participating in the assembly and have increased political efficacy, but no evidence of significant behavioural change.
- Low public awareness of the assembly, partly explained by relative lack of priority and resources given to communication.
While the impact of the assembly is disappointing, this type of evaluation can help us draw lessons for the development of more effective impact strategies for future assemblies'.
More info:
The Spanish Citizens' Climate Assembly (SCCA) started in November 2021 and concluded in May 2022. This report aims to evaluate the SCCA's impact across different areas, including policy, assembly members’ attitudes, public engagement, and the media. To guide this evaluation, we employed the Impact Evaluation Framework (IEF) developed by Christina Demski and Stuart Capstick of the Centre for Climate Change and Social Transformations (CAST) for the Knowledge Network of Climate Assemblies (KNOCA). Our research strategy relied on methodological triangulation, incorporating various means of data collection, including: opinion surveys (among assembly members, the general population, and political representatives and
policymakers), qualitative interviews (with organisers, assembly members, public servants, and recognised experts), document analysis, and a systematic examination of digital and social media.
Food systems affect and are affected by the interrelated crises of climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and health, amongst others. Transforming to sustainable approaches is vital, yet entangled with uncertainties, complexity and a great value diversion with stakeholders. Deliberative processes such as citizen assemblies offer a valuable contribution to such a transformation, since the crises and their responses affect everyday life, and therefore inviting individual and collective action. Still, who is included and whose knowledge counts affects outcomes. Theoretically anchored in concepts of environmental justice, our study analyses three nation-wide citizens’ assemblies on climate change and food systems from Western Europe. It assesses (a) how citizens’ assemblies can incorporate a broad set of viewpoints and design more substantive political answers to current crises, and (b) whether citizens’ assemblies include environmental justice aspects to facilitate social change. The paper argues that systematic and methodologically reflected inclusion of various positionalities can inspire decision-making processes in that they incorporate procedural, recognition, and distributional justice to address problems of climate change or modern food systems. It concludes with offering further approaches to include more than scientific knowledge in deliberative processes for a just transformation towards sustainability.
The need for engaging citizens in climate policymaking is increasingly recognised. Despite indications that the form of expert involvement can strongly influence participatory processes, this remains scarcely researched. We analysed two unique and contrasting cases of citizen engagement in national climate mitigation policy: (1) the Irish Citizens’ Assembly (ICA), the first national climate assembly involving live expert presentations and face-to-face deliberations; and (2) the Participatory Value Evaluation (PVE) on Dutch climate policymaking, where more than 10,000 citizens compared policy options in an online environment based on expert-based information on policy effects. Taking a dramaturgical approach, we found that the opening up and closing down of policy options and perspectives was influenced by the setting, staging and scripting of expertise. Apart from providing information on policy options, experts had significant roles in design choices and formulating recommendations, which shaped citizens’ deliberations and policy advice. In deliberative processes, citizens’ deliberations can be further influenced by putting experts in a privileged spot and emphasising their authority, whereas in the setting of an online tool, experts’ design choices may be masked by the fact-like presentation of expertise. Future research should further investigate the role of experts and expertise across a wider range of practices. Nevertheless, we conclude that the high degree of required technical knowledge in climate mitigation policy naturally implies strong expert involvement, which concomitantly steers the results. Alternatively, we may search to enhance citizens’ engagement in guiding climate policymakers by focusing on citizens’ normative perspectives.
There is a growing body of scientific evidence supporting sufficiency as an inevitable strategy for mitigating climate change. Despite this, sufficiency plays a minor role in existing climate and energy policies. Following previous work on the National Energy and Climate Plans of EU countries, we conduct a similar content analysis of the recommendations made by citizen assemblies on climate change mitigation in ten European countries and the EU, and compare the results of these studies. Citizen assemblies are representative mini-publics and enjoy a high level of legitimacy.
We identify a total of 860 mitigation policy recommendations in the citizen assemblies’ documents, of which 332 (39 %) include sufficiency. Most of the sufficiency policies relate to the mobility sector, the least relate to the buildings sector. Regulatory instruments are the most often proposed means for achieving sufficiency, followed by fiscal and economic instruments. The average approval rate of sufficiency policies is high (93 %), with the highest rates for regulatory policies.
Compared to National Energy and Climate Plans, the citizen assembly recommendations include a significantly higher share of sufficiency policies (factor three to six) with a stronger focus on regulatory policies. Consequently, the recommendations can be interpreted as a call for a sufficiency turn and a regulatory turn in climate mitigation politics. These results suggest that the observed lack of sufficiency in climate policy making is not due to a lack of legitimacy, but rather reflects a reluctance to implement sufficiency policies, the constitution of the policy making process and competing interests.
A plethora of research suggests that the internal quality of the CA (or any citizendeliberation) is crucial for the legitimacy of decision-making but also for how participants are included and affected. For a long time, research looked at knowledge and opinion change as the primary outcome of a deliberative process while largely overlooking the quality of deliberation and its impact on these effects. High-quality deliberation does not imply change per se, but rather evidence that the groupprocesses helped individuals to gain newknowledge and confront different perspectives. This chapter focuses on internal dynamics and their role for these transformations. Features that enhance equality are considered particularly important. Hence, focus is on inclusion, diversity and deliberative disagreement, experts and evidence, reflection and perspective-taking.
In recent years, many local authorities in the UK have run local climate assemblies (LCAs) such as citizens’ assemblies or juries, with the goal of developing citizen-led solutions to the climate crisis. In this essay, we argue that a ‘convenient fiction’ often underpins the way local authority actors explain the rationale for running LCAs. This convenient fiction runs as follows: LCAs are commissioned as a response to the climate threat, and local decision-makers work through LCA recommendations to implement appropriate policies in their locality. We suggest that this narrative smooths over and presents as linear a process that is in fact messy and political. LCAs emerge as a result of political pressure and bargaining. Once LCAs have run their course, the extent to which their recommendations are implemented is dependent on power dynamics and institutional capacities. We argue that it is important to surface the messiness and political tensions that underpin the origins and aftermath of local climate assemblies. This achieves three things. First, it helps manage expectations about the impact LCAs are likely to have on the policy process. Second, it broadens understandings of how LCAs can contribute to change. Third, it provides a complex model that actors can use to understand how they can help deliver climate action through politics. We conclude that LCAs are important — if as yet unproven — new interventions in local climate politics, when assessed against this more complex picture.
In recent years, countries like France, UK, Germany, and Denmark have all carried out climate citizens’ assemblies where a group of representatively selected citizens come together to discuss issues around climate politics and provide policy recommendations to decision-makers. The hope is that these deliberative-democratic innovations can circumvent the flaws of representational politics and help break the existing gridlock around climate politics. In this article, relying on the case of the Danish climate citizens’ assembly that began its work in 2020, we argue that to truly realize the democratic potentials of climate citizens’ assemblies, there is a need to think about how citizens’ assemblies might come to multiply and proliferate in political spaces away from, or at least in addition to, those in and around the state, so they can become local drivers of democratic action and community empowerment. The argument is not that citizens’ assemblies should give up on affecting the state and parliamentary politics altogether, but that we must be careful not to put too much faith in state institutions, and also look for spaces outside the state where the conditions for transformative change and democratic capacity-building currently appear more fecund. Drawing together these arguments, we offer what we call a more radical vision of the democratic potentials of climate citizens’ assemblies, and provide some guidelines for what that would look like in practice.
Stymied by preoccupation with short-term interests of individualist consumers, democratic institutions seem unable to generate sustained political commitment for tackling climate change. The citizens’ assembly (CA) is promoted as an important tool in combatting this “democratic myopia.” The aim of a CA is to bring together a representative group of citizens and experts from diverse backgrounds to exchange their different insights and perspectives on a complex issue. By providing the opportunity for inclusive democratic deliberation, the CA is expected to educate citizens, stimulate awareness of complex issues, and produce enlightened and legitimate policy recommendations. However, critical voices warn about the simplified and celebratory commentary surrounding the CA. Informed by agonistic and radical democratic theory, this paper elaborates on a particular concern, which is the orientation toward consensus in the CA. The paper points to the importance of disagreement in the form of both agony (from inside) and rupture (from outside) that, it is argued, is crucial for a democratic, engaging, passionate, creative, and representative sustainability politics.
While deliberative citizens’ assemblies and plebiscitary referendums have long been perceived as antithetical, the idea of combining the two democratic instruments for better connecting administration and society has come to the fore in both theory and practice in more recent years. In this article, three ways of linking citizens’ assemblies to the referendum process are distinguished, exemplified, institutionally compared, and reflectively discussed. The three—the referendum-preparing, referendum-scrutinizing, and referendum-elaborating citizens’ assembly—come with their distinctive features, potential merits, scope limits, and related design questions. Fitting the “square peg of deliberative democracy” into the “round hole of direct democracy” and embedding hybrid design in diverging political systems are overarching challenges of institutional design. The article concludes that considering recent developments in theory and practice, the idea of a deliberative referendum linking citizens’ assemblies to direct voting on issues, seems an idea whose time has come, but also comes with challenges and questions that design thinkers and practitioners have only begun to tackle and answer.
The French and the German national parliaments are dominated by highly educated, older, and mostly male politicians. There are growing calls for a more balanced political representation of different social groups. This paper seeks to inform this debate by conceptualizing and measuring representation gaps for women, people of immigrant origin, the working class, and younger age groups in France and Germany and by assessing the potential of deliberative participatory fora to ameliorate underrepresentation. Based on theories of deliberative and participatory democracy, it suggests three criteria these fora must fulfill to potentially balance underrepresentation (descriptive representation in composition, deliberative quality, and coupling to politics) and explores them empirically in four recent cases of deliberative participatory fora: the Grand Débat National and the Convention Citoyenne pour le Climat in France and the Bürgerrat Deutschlands Rolle in der Welt and the Bürgerrat Klima in Germany. We show that significant representation gaps exist for all groups studied. They have been narrowing for women and people of immigrant origin and remain most pronounced for class. Regarding institutional features, our cases fare relatively well in terms of balanced composition and deliberative quality, but the potential to balance representation gaps is seriously limited by a lack of coupling to the political system.
The perceived disconnect between policymaking elites and citizens has intensified demands for citizen engagement in democracies, but we know little about policymakers' attitudes towards increased citizen involvement. This study presents an in‐depth, mixed‐methods analysis of participatory views of politicians, public officials, and interest group representatives in Finland. We first utilize a unique survey battery presented to representative samples of policymakers (n = 675) and ordinary citizens (n = 1701). We then perform a qualitative content analysis for 24 in‐depth interviews of high‐ranking policymakers to explore reasons for the observed attitudes. We find that while citizens strongly support participatory attitudes, policymakers are more skeptical, especially when participation threatens their control of the policy process. Elite skepticism stems mainly from low trust in citizens' capacity to deal with complexity, and to relieve the pressure to engage citizens more elites support learning‐based methods. The broad citizen‐elite attitude gap may require re‐negotiating representative mandates in the future.
IMPACT
Since the 1980s, deliberative democracy has dominated thinking around democratic innovation as an approach to address the ongoing legitimacy crisis of public insitutions. One of the methods of implementing deliberative democracy, citizen assemblies (CAs), are increasingly being applied to mainstream decision-making. The scale in the UK has been notable—representing a seminal juncture in the adoption of CA as a method of public engagement. This article focuses on how these processes, so far, have connected to the wider public sphere and the decision-making processes of commissioning organizations to explore whether this represents a sustainable method for democratic renewal or a passing fad.
Constitutionalism is in the midst of both a participatory and a deliberative turn. In this article, we explore one aspect of this turn—the use of deliberative innovations to enhance constitutional amendment processes. Ireland has been cited as almost a paradigm case for such experimentation. We assess deliberative mini-publics’ potential as a tool for consensus democracy based on the experience and impact of the Irish Citizens’ Assembly that made recommendations for wholesale reform of Ireland’s abortion laws in 2018. We identify a “legislative-majority-plus” model for constitutional amendment deployed in most jurisdictions with master-text constitutions and on that basis, characterize constitutional amendment as an aspect of consensual, rather than competitive, democracy. Based on this understanding of the function of constitutional amendment processes, we argue that the Citizens’ Assembly played a significant role in the process of public will formation. In particular, it helped to generate political and public support for a particular form of liberalization—abortion on request within the first twelve weeks—and made it easier for legislators to avoid the incentives of electoral politics and formulate an amendment proposal that attracted wide support despite intense opposition. However, we raise concerns about the normative legitimacy of that impact, based on deficiencies in the representativeness of the Assembly, arguing that in order to be a tool for will formation, rather than manipulation, in respect of constitutional amendment, deliberative mini-publics should be designed so as to enhance their representativeness.
Many societies are now having to live with the impacts of climate change and are being confronted with heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and rising sea levels. Without radical action, future generations will inherit an even more degraded planet. This raises the question: How can political institutions be reformed to promote justice for future generations and to leave them an ecologically sustainable world? In this essay, I address a particular version of this question; namely: How can supra–state institutions and transnational political processes be transformed to realize climate justice for future generations? The essay seeks to make two contributions. First, it considers what criteria should guide the evaluation of proposals for reform. It proposes four criteria, and analyzes how they should be interpreted and applied. Second, it considers a raft of different proposals, commenting on their strengths and weaknesses. It presents ten proposals in all, including, among others, establishing a UN high commissioner for future generations, appointing a UN special envoy for future generations, creating a UN agency mandated to protect future generations, instituting representatives for the future in all key UN bodies, ensuring greater youth participation in transnational political decision-making processes, and further developing a global citizens’ assembly. In short, my aim is to outline some of the options available and to defend a normative framework that we can use to evaluate them.
Recent years have seen a “wave” of national climate assemblies, which bring together randomly‐selected citizens to deliberate and make recommendations on aspects of the climate crisis. Assessments of the legitimacy of these interventions and their capacity to improve climate governance have focused on their internal design characteristics, but the fundamental question of how they are integrated into complex constellations of political and policy institutions is underexplored. This article constructs a framework for understanding their integrative design characteristics, drawing on recent work on “robust governance.” The framework is used to explore the connection of six national‐level climate assemblies with political institutions, public debate, and civil society. Our findings highlight significant variety in the integrative design of these climate assemblies. This variety challenges the view of assemblies as a standardized object with predictable effects on legitimacy and governance capacity, while also refining deliberative systems theory's highly abstracted conceptions of integration and impact.
Businesses and business scholars interested in tackling climate change can benefit by engaging with the innovative but nascent movement of climate assemblies. I articulate three promising ways they can meaningfully engage with this movement.
Launched in 2019, the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate (CCC) tasked 150 randomly chosen citizens with proposing fair and effective measures to fight climate change. This was to be fulfilled through an “innovative co-construction procedure”, involving some unspecified external input alongside that from the citizens. Did inputs from the steering bodies undermine the citizens’ accountability for the output? Did co-construction help the output resonate with the general public, as is expected from a citizens’ assembly? To answer these questions, we build on our unique experience in observing the CCC proceedings and documenting them with qualitative and quantitative data. We find that the steering bodies’ input, albeit significant, did not impair the citizens’ agency, creativity, and freedom of choice. While succeeding in creating consensus among the citizens who were involved, this co-constructive approach, however, failed to generate significant support among the broader public. These results call for a strengthening of the commitment structure that determines how follow-up on the proposals from a citizens’ assembly should be conducted.
How do face-to-face, assembly processes, and non-face-to-face, popular vote processes impact the decisions made by citizens? Normative discussions of the comparative merits of these two broad types of participatory decision-making processes partly rely on empirical assumptions concerning this question. In this paper, we test the central assumption that assemblies lead to decisions that are more widely supported by participants than popular votes. We do so by analyzing 1,400 decisions made through these processes on the highly salient issue of municipal mergers in Swiss municipalities since 1999. We find that assembly decisions are consistently made by larger majorities than popular vote decisions and that this relationship is significantly mediated by turnout. This suggests that higher levels of agreement in assemblies mainly result from selection biases – with fewer dissenting citizens participating in assemblies than in popular votes – rather than from internal dynamics in assemblies.
The upcoming vogue of climate assemblies and other forms of mini-publics are to give citizens a central role in climate policy-making and to break the political impasse. Yet climate mini-publics face challenges in political environments too, such as co-option, favoring expert opinions, and losing touch with the broader public. To remedy such pitfalls, recent papers have argued to combine synchronous deliberations of small groups of citizens with online participation procedures for the larger public. In this article, we report the results of a three-step combination model, where first a mini-public in the region of Súdwest-Fryslân (NL) was given a “carte blanche” to draft the content and the parameters of several related policy alternatives. Second, their proposals were fed into a digital participation tool to consult the wider public. Third, a citizens forum translated the outcomes of the maxi-public into policy recommendations, which were unanimously approved by the municipal council. In this paper, we report our findings of combining mini- and maxi-publics and how the actors involved evaluated the strengths and weaknesses of the combination of these two participatory approaches.
Academics and practitioners are increasingly interested in deliberative minipublics and whether these can address widespread dissatisfaction with contemporary politics. While optimism seems to prevail, there is also talk that the use of minipublics may backfire. When the government disregards a minipublic's recommendations, this could lead to more dissatisfaction than not asking for its advice in the first place. Using an online survey experiment in Belgium (n = 3,102), we find that, compared to a representative decision‐making process, a minipublic tends to bring about higher political support when its recommendations are fully adopted by the government, whereas it generates lower political support when its recommendations are not adopted. This study presents novel insights into whether and when the use of minipublics may alleviate or aggravate political dissatisfaction among the public at large. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
In recent years, climate citizens’ assemblies – randomly selected representative citizens gathered to make policy recommendations on greenhouse gas emissions targets – have gained in popularity as a potential innovative solution to the failure of governments to design and adopt ambitious climate change laws and policies. This article appraises the process and outcomes of three climate citizens’ assemblies held at the national level – in Ireland, France and the United Kingdom – and evaluates their contributions to the making of climate law and policy. In doing so, it first looks at whether citizens’ assemblies have the ability to improve the substance of climate law and suggests that they face difficulties in providing an integrated, holistic response to the climate problem. It then explores how citizens’ assemblies have fed into subsequent legislative processes to show their positive influence and draws lessons for our understanding of the role of citizens’ assemblies in climate lawmaking.
No democratic state has yet implemented a climate plan strong enough to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. This has led some to argue that democracy cannot cope with a challenge of this magnitude. In this article, we take stock of the claim that a more deliberative democratic system can strengthen our ability to respond effectively to the climate crisis. The most visible development in this direction is the recent citizens’ assemblies on climate change in Ireland, France, and the UK. We begin our analysis of the promise of deliberative democracy with a recognition of the difficulties that democracies face in tackling climate change, including short‐termism; the ways in which scientific and expert evidence are used; the influence of powerful political interests; and the relationship between people and the politicians that represent them. We then introduce the theoretical tradition of deliberative democracy and examine how it might ameliorate the challenges democracies face in responding to the climate crisis. We evaluate the contribution of deliberative mini‐publics, such as citizens’ assemblies and juries, and look beyond these formal processes to examine how deliberation can be embedded in political and social systems around the world. We conclude that deliberation‐based reforms to democratic systems, including but not limited to deliberative mini‐publics, are a necessary and potentially transformative ingredient in climate action.
This article is categorized under: Perceptions, Behavior, and Communication of Climate Change > Communication
Policy and Governance > Governing Climate Change in Communities, Cities, and Regions
Ireland is a setting where citizens’ assemblies (CAs) have played a prominent role, driving considerable policy change and impactful referendum initiatives. Irish citizens are therefore particularly likely to be aware of the potential of such deliberative processes. We examine citizen’s support for political reforms towards more deliberation, as well as their potential willingness to engage. We find that support and participation are driven by citizens who are dissatisfied with the regime, or who are particularly likely to be politically engaged. While the former tend to support most types of political reforms, the latter are in particular driven towards more deliberative modes of politics. Our findings furthermore suggest that participation rates in CAs will be lower among some cohorts of society than others and correlated with factors such as education, political interest, and perceived corruption.
In the context of public disaffection towards representative democracies, political leaders are increasingly establishing citizens’ assemblies to foster participatory governance. These deliberative fora composed of randomly selected citizens have attracted much scholarly attention regarding their theoretical foundations and internal functioning. Nevertheless, we lack research that scrutinizes the reasons why political leaders – who hold the power in representative democracies – create such new institutions. This article fills this gap by analysing a specific case: the first permanent randomly selected citizens' assembly that will work in collaboration with a parliament in the long‐term (Ostbelgien, Belgium). This case is analysed through a framework that pays close attention to the context in which it developed, the profiles of political elites that supported its creation, as well as the multiple objectives it was vested with. The findings reveal that initiators of citizens’ assemblies fundamentally conceive them as a way to strengthen a polity's identity, to save the electoral model of democracy, and to restore the legitimacy of traditional political leaders. We analyse the implications of this particular conception and discuss whether we should accordingly consider participatory and deliberative institutions as elites’ legitimation tools.
This article addresses two great global challenges of the 2020s. On one hand, the accelerating climate crisis and, on the other, the deepening crisis of representation within liberal democracies. As temperatures and water levels rise, rates of popular confidence in existing democratic institutions decline. So, what is to be done? This article discusses whether sortition – the ancient Greek practice of selecting individuals for political office through lottery – could serve to mitigate both crises simultaneously. Since the 2000s, sortition has attracted growing interest among activists and academics. Recently it has been identified in countries like the UK and France as a mechanism for producing legitimate political answers to the climate challenge. However, few theoretical reflections on the potentials and perils of sortition-based climate governance have yet emerged. This article contributes to filling the gap. Based on a critique of the first successful case of sortition used to enhance national environmental policy – in Ireland in 2017–18 – we argue that sortition-based deliberation could indeed speed up meaningful climate action whilst improving the health of democratic systems. However, this positive outcome is not preordained. Success depends not only on green social movements getting behind climate sortition but also on developing flexible, context-specific designs that identify adequate solutions to a number of problems, including those of power (providing citizens’ assemblies with clear agenda-setting prerogatives beyond non-binding consultation); expertise (allowing assembly participants to influence which stakeholders and experts to solicit inputs from); and participation (engaging wider parts of the citizenry in the deliberative process).
Randomly selected deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) are on the rise globally. However, they remain ad hoc, opening the door to arbitrary manoeuvre and triggering a debate on their future institutionalization. What are the competing proposals aiming at institutionalizing DMPs within political systems? I suggest three ways for thinking about institutionalization: in terms of temporality, of legitimacy and support, and of power and role within a system. First, I analyze the dimension of time and how this affect DMP institutional designs. Second, I argue that because sortition produces ‘weak representatives’ with ‘humility-legitimacy’, mini-publics hardly ever make binding decisions and need to rely on external sources of legitimacies. Third, I identify four institutional models, relying on opposing views of legitimacy and politics: tamed consultation, radical democracy, representative klerocracy and hybrid polyarchy. They differ in whether mini-publics are interpreted as tools: for legitimizing elected officials; to give power to the people; or as a mean to suppress voting .
In recent times we have seen a spate of climate assemblies across Europe as the climate emergency gains increasing prominence in the political agenda and as the citizens’ assembly approach to public engagement gains popularity. However, there has been little empirical research on how the scope of citizens’ assemblies affects the internal logic of the assembly process and its impacts on external policy actors. This is a significant oversight given the power of agenda setting. It is also of particular importance for climate assemblies given the exceptional scale and complexity of climate change, as well as the need for co-ordination across all policy areas and types of governance to address it. In this paper, we start to address this gap through an in-depth case analysis of the Climate Assembly UK. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining surveys of the assembly members and witnesses, interviews with the assembly members, organisers, MPs, parliamentary staff, and government civil servants, and non-participant observation of the process. We find that attempts to adapt the assembly’s scope to the scale of the climate change issue compromised assembly member learning, the co-ordination of the resulting recommendations, assembly member endorsement of the recommendations, and the extent of their impact on parliament and government. We argue that more democratization in setting the agenda could help combat these issues.
Highlights
Citizen assemblies and juries (CAJs) must meet generally accepted standards and be citizen-led to genuinely and credibly engage citizens. Agreed implementation and follow-up procedures should be established to ensure CAJs legitimately inform policymaking. CAJs are not a panacea to public participation on climate change and much more needs to be done beyond them.
Innovative forms of deliberative democracy are gaining traction in governing responses to climate change in Europe and beyond. Proponents of deliberative democracy have drawn attention to its particular suitability for shaping responses to environmental challenges. Citizen engagement and participation is also a prominent feature of the European Green Deal. This article considers the relationship between turbulence and deliberative democracy in the context of climate transitions, exploring when and how such democratic innovations are likely to generate turbulence in the governance of climate transitions. A framework is developed that focuses on three important sets of characteristics of deliberative mini-publics (DMPs): (a) the nature of their formal mandates and the ways in which climate change is framed as a policy problem; (b) the nature of participation and the degree to which the participants are empowered to shape the deliberative processes in which they participate; and (c) the degree to which DMPs are coupled with relevant policymaking processes. This framework is used to explore two recent and high-profile cases of a particular type of DMP: citizens’ assemblies in Ireland and France. The article contributes to the literatures on turbulent governance and deliberative democracy by reflecting on key dimensions of DMPs from the analytical perspective of turbulent governance.
In light of increasing pressure to deliver climate action targets and the growing role of citizens in raising the importance of the issue, deliberative democratic processes (e.g. citizen juries and citizen assemblies) on climate change are increasingly being used to provide a voice to citizens in climate change decision-making. Through a comparative case study of two processes that ran in the UK in 2019 (the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury and the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change), this paper investigates how far citizen assemblies and juries are increasing citizen engagement on climate change and creating more citizen-centred climate policymaking. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, councillors, professional facilitators and others involved in running these processes to assess motivations for conducting these, their structure and the impact and influence they had. The findings suggest the impact of these processes is not uniform: they have an indirect impact on policy making by creating momentum around climate action and supporting the introduction of pre-planned or pre-existing policies rather than a direct impact by truly being citizen-centred policy making processes or conducive to new climate policy. We conclude with reflections on how these processes give elected representatives a public mandate on climate change, that they help to identify more nuanced and in-depth public opinions in a fair and informed way, yet it can be challenging to embed citizen juries and assemblies in wider democratic processes.
The effects of climate change are multiple and fundamental. Decisions made today may result in irreversible damage to the planet’s biodiversity and ecosystems, the detrimental impacts of which will be borne by today’s children, young people and those yet unborn (future generations). The use of citizens’ assemblies (CAs) to tackle the issue of climate change is growing. Their remit is future focused. Yet is the future in the room? Focusing on a single case study, the recent Irish CA and Joint Oireachtas Committee on Climate Action (JOCCA) deliberations on climate action, this paper explores the extent to which children, young people and future generations were included. Its systemic analysis of the membership of both institutions, the public submissions to them and the invited expertise presented, finds that the Irish CA was ‘too tightly coupled’ on this issue. This may have been beneficial in terms of impact, but it came at the expense of input legitimacy and potentially intergenerational justice. Referring to international developments, it suggests how these groups may be included through enclave deliberation, institutional innovations, design experiments and future-oriented practice. .
Citizens’ assemblies bring the shared wisdom of ordinary people into political decision making on the climate and ecological crisis. They are increasingly being used at local, national and even global levels. But with what impact? Can they take us beyond the shortcomings of electoral and partisan politics? Can they make a real difference? This book explains why climate assemblies have captured the imagination of governments and activists alike, exploring the ways they can have a meaningful impact on climate politics. This book charts the development of climate assemblies across Europe and beyond. It explores what ordinary people want, highlighting the ways in which assembly recommendations take us beyond current government policies and offer new visions and directions for change. It shows that not all assemblies are the same and that the context and design of climate assemblies have differed quite profoundly – as have their impacts on policy and public discourse. The book also lays out the key elements needed for climate assemblies to have sustained impact, providing essential insights for anyone wanting to run or advocate for them, and concludes with reflections on what we can expect from assemblies as they evolve. The transition to net zero and climate resilient societies requires deep social and economic transformations that will have significant impacts on citizens’ choices and behaviours. Such a transition needs to engage the public directly and this book shows how climate assemblies can achieve this, allowing us to address the issues we all face together.
Transition to a sustainable net zero society is an urgent task, and if it is to be achieve, it will be essential to have the participation of citizens who are responsible for climate damage and emission reduction. Climate citizens’ assemblies have been held mainly in Europe since around 2019. A climate citizens’ assembly is a meeting where citizens selected by random sampling discuss and put together recommendations for use in climate policies of national and local governments. This paper reviews these assemblies, summarizes their significance, and looks at what the challenges are to establishing their use in Japan.
The Citizens’ Assembly pilots on local democracy and devolution were the first of their kind in the United Kingdom. Organised by Democracy Matters — an alliance of university researchers and civil society organisations led by Professor Matthew Flinders — and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, the Assemblies took place in Southampton and Sheffield towards the end of 2015.
In response to the limitations of elite-driven democratic innovations, social movements have proposed democratic innovations that are democracy-driven. They claim that democracy-driven governance generates legitimacy by better responding to citizens’ demands. However, whether participating citizens support this claim remains unclear. Under what conditions do participants accept the legitimacy of a mini-public that has been set up by a social movement party? We examine this question by conducting an in-depth case study of the Brussels Citizens’ Assembly organized by the Agora movement party throughout its entire process. Adopting mixed-methods, we find that participants’ perceived legitimacy is shaped by a process-long, dynamic interaction between organizers and participants. Legitimacy is enhanced when organizers grant participants authorship over the BCA’s procedural design and breaks down when they fail to do so.
Recent deliberative systems research has emphasized the need to “scale up” deliberative mini-publics by exploring connections between mini-publics and broader arenas of policymaking. Less is known, however, about how the policy environment in a state or region might itself influence a deliberative event. In this article, we set out to examine how the internal dynamics of mini-publics are affected by the scaling-up process of connecting to larger policymaking domains. To better understand how the external role of deliberation affects the internal dynamics, we analyze two notable cases of deliberative forums addressing public problems. In both cases, the 2017 Our Coastal Future Forum in South Carolina and the 2020 Oregon Citizens’ Assembly on coronavirus disease-19 recovery, citizen participants grappled with the challenge of scaling up to larger policy outcomes. We conduct a thematic analysis of transcripts from both events, focusing on how citizens discuss their role in influencing policy and talk about the potential for policy output from the mini-publics. The analysis reveals that the scaling-up process invites a pragmatic orientation within deliberation, centering on issues of efficiency, scope, and efficacy.
As representative democracy is increasingly criticized, a new institution is becoming popular among academics and practitioners: deliberative citizens’ assemblies. To evaluate whether these assemblies can deliver their promise of re‐engaging the dissatisfied of representative politics, we explore who supports them and why. We build on a unique survey conducted with representative samples of 15 Western European countries and find, first, that the most supportive are those who are less educated, have a low sense of political competence and an anti‐elite sentiment. Thus, support does come from the dissatisfied. Second, we find that this support is for a part ‘outcome contingent’, in the sense that it changes with respondents’ expectations regarding the policy outcome from deliberative citizens’ assemblies. This second finding nuances the first one and suggests that while deliberative citizens’ assemblies convey some hope to re‐engage disengaged citizens, this is conditioned to the expectation of a favourable outcome. This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved
Since the We the Citizens project of 2011, Ireland has begun to establish itself as a world leader in the use of national deliberative fora for considering policy change. In many ways, it marks a radical departure from the tightly-controlled, executive-dominated parliamentary politics of Dáil Éireann. Thus far, innovative deliberative processes have had a direct influence on two hugely transformative moral/social referendums: the marriage equality referendum of 2015 (recommended by the 2013–14 Convention on the Constitution) and the abortion referendum of 2018 (recommended by the Citizens’ Assembly in 2017). With the extensive recommendations of the recent Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality, there may yet be more deliberation-led social transformation to come. This paper considers the involvement and influence of women in Ireland’s deliberative processes and their contribution to the country’s ongoing social transformation. Particular attention is paid to the much greater descriptive representation offered by these sortition-formed assemblies compared to Ireland’s electoral bodies, and their record of delivering ‘woman-friendly’ outcomes is assessed. Consideration is also given to the possibility that these processes may resolve some of the tension between descriptive and substantive representation through women’s direct participation in deliberative decision-making.
In the opening lines of Ruling the Void Peter Mair states that ‘[t]he age of party democracy has passed’. In his eyes political parties are failing and with them democracy itself. This paper addresses Mair’s concerns about the state of democracy. We review the latest evidence on how democracies have been innovating over the past twenty years or more, with particular attention to reforms that seek to bring citizens into the heart of discussions about constitutional and institutional reforms and significant policy issues. We show how deliberative mini-publics are becoming a more common feature of democratic government today, and, in some instances, how they are being embedded into the democratic system. We assess the implications for the state of state of democratic government today.