Graham Smith’s research while affiliated with University of Westminster and other places

Climate change is one of the defining challenges of our time that will determine the fate of coming generations on our planet. Climate action since the 2015 Paris Agreement shows that while solutions are available, neither ambition nor implementation are progressing at the required pace. Democratic institutions must adapt to the cause not only to protect the climate but also since climate change poses an existential risk to democracy. Democracy will struggle to remain a credible and legitimate political system if it does not identify effective solutions to the climate crisis. Climate assemblies are examples of innovation that includes citizens directly in developing climate policy, which can raise climate ambition and strengthen the legitimacy of the difficult policy choices involved in the transition towards net zero. Climate assemblies can potentially turn protest demands into actionable recommendations and help build social mandates for change. This Report examines lessons learned from the first wave of climate assemblies and discusses how deliberative practices may help build more ambitious and citizen-owned climate agendas.

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.

This symposium examines the challenges and opportunities of recent efforts at embedding participatory governance. It draws together original research that engages theoretically and empirically with some fundamental questions: •What are the challenges of embedding participatory governance in policy-making? •What happens when social movements have opportunities to shape the institutionalization of PG processes? Can they reanimate the radical potential of citizen participation for social transformation? •How can the tensions between the different demands of lay citizens, organized civil society, political parties, and public officials be managed? In this introductory article, we provide a definition of embeddedness, outlining its spatial, temporal, and practices dimensions, in so doing distinguishing embeddedness from institutionalization, with which it has often been used interchangeably. Our aim is to delineate the breadth of the concept, drawing together its many uses into a systematic framework that can both guide future research and practical experimentation. In particular, our hope is to turn more attention to the informal practices that are essential for embedding. The contributions to the symposium shift attention from institutional design to embedding dynamics and how these work to open or close spaces for meaningful citizen input.

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

The need for democratic control of the application of expert knowledge is a common refrain in debates on the democratization of policy making. However, there has been relatively little attention empirically to how expert knowledge is integrated into local participatory processes. This paper analyzes how the assessments of local officers and external consultants are incorporated in a diversity of local participatory processes in Spain between 2007 and 2011. Our interest is in whether expert assessments of the feasibility of participants' proposals takes place; and if so, whether there is transparent oversight of the application of these judgements. The paper combines qualitative and quantitative approaches to show the importance of institutional design when dealing with the timing, style and impact of expert knowledge in participatory processes.

The characteristics of participatory institutions can be articulated in three main dimensions: input, process and output. The common assumption is that a dependency relationship exists, with process serving as a mediator between input and output. This paper puts the model to a rare empirical test drawing on a unique dataset of 70 Spanish advisory councils. Through a combination of exploratory factor and path analyses, we analyse the dimensionality of input, process and output and investigate the direct and indirect impact of inputs on process and outputs. Our analysis provides evidence that input factors have a direct impact on the output factor transparency, but their impact on effects on policy and participant satisfaction is mediated by the process factor deliberation. Further, the capacity of the public administration to steer the advisory council (wardship) mediates negatively the impact of input variables on transparency. The analysis provides a nuanced account of how different input and process design characteristics of participatory institutions have profound direct and indirect effects on their outputs.

This editorial introduction provides a statement of our vision for the Journal of Deliberative Democracy and an overview of the Special Issue on the Frontiers of Deliberative Democracy.

As illustrated in the introduction, the special issue ends with a ‘collective interview’ to some distinguished scholars that have given an important contribution to the study of New England Town Meetings. The collective interview has been realized by submitting three questions to our interviewees, who responded individually in written. The text of the answers has not been edited, if not minimally. However, the editors have broken up longer individual answers in shorter parts. These have been subsequently rearranged in an effort to provide, as much as possible, a fluid structure and a degree of interaction among the different perspectives provided by our interviewees on similar issues. The final version of this interview has been edited and approved by all interviewees.

Carole Pateman reflects on her fifty years of scholarship in conversation with Graham Smith. The discussion focuses particular attention on Pateman’s work on participatory democracy and considers her contributions to debates on political obligation, feminism, basic income, and deliberative democracy.