In person icon Climate Assemblies and Climate Justice: Building Civic Institutions for a Climate-Changed World

Abstract

This panel focuses on the recent wave of climate assemblies, populated through sortition and designed to embody principles of deliberative democracy, that are being rolled out across Europe (KNOCA). With the rapid spread of this approach to public engagement on climate governance, practice has developed well in advance of research. This panel helps address that gap by analysing the internal and external dimensions of climate assemblies and how the two relate to each other. The panel aims to support systemic understanding and to establish under what conditions climate assemblies can meaningfully contribute to change in climate governance, policy, and action. It has been suggested that climate assemblies are better equipped for cultivating the long-term thinking required to address climate change in a just manner than traditional liberal democratic institutions, as they are free from electoral incentives and short-term political cycles. Assembly members do not need to respond to present day public and media opinion to win votes (Fischer 2017; Smith 2021), they are less likely to be the target of lobbyists and therefore less prone to sectoral capture (Willis et al. 2022), and less susceptible to climate delay discourses (Lamb et al. 2020). Climate assemblies can be a better way to engage people than other processes because there is an aim to provide balanced evidence which reduces silo-thinking (Howarth 2020) and misinformation (Boykoff & Farrell 2019). They also offer new possibilities for the formation of transnational or global publics needed to address global issues like climate change and ecological breakdown (Dryzek et al. 2011). Finally, they can create new opportunities for including the voices of natural worlds and future generations (Kulha et al. 2021). These benefits to climate governance will only occur if climate assemblies can enact some form of change. However, citizens’ assemblies have been criticized for lacking the capacity for this type of agency and are often labelled as impotent and easily manipulated (Elstub & Khoban 2023). Climate assemblies may be even more susceptible to this problem. They could be used as mechanisms to prevent change in climate governance and to preserve unsustainable arrangements (Blühdorn 2013). The orientation towards consensus in climate assemblies may stifle the agonism and rupture required to promote sustainable politics (Machin 2023). Moreover, if climate assemblies are commissioned by governments, the discourses included in them may not be sufficiently radical to promote new ecological trajectories (Hammond 2020). More research is required to understand how the internal and external dimensions of climate assemblies relate to each other and there is a need for more conceptual, comparative, and systemic research. More research on climate assemblies and the barriers and enablers to change is clearly required to move beyond the study of a few cases. Deliberative democracy has taken a systemic turn (Dryzek 2017), including the analysis of mini-publics (Beauvais & Warren 2019). This systemic analysis now needs to be extended to climate assemblies. Whilst research on mini-publics has progressed substantially (Curato et al. 2021), research on climate assemblies is in its infancy. It is important to address this gap because climate change is such a unique, multifaceted challenge that findings from other mini-public research will not necessarily apply to assemblies in this context. To address these gaps, this panel presents work on these themes, drawn from two forthcoming collections: Climate Assemblies: Building Civic Institutions for a Climate-changed World (De Gruyter) and a special issue of Environmental Science and Policy on ‘Citizens’ Assemblies in Climate Governance: An Analysis of Barriers and Enablers for Change’.

Title	Details
Learning from Practice: Expanding the OECD’s Impact Evaluation Criteria Based on Experiences of Subnational Climate Assemblies in France, Spain and Portugal	View Paper Details
Climate Change Assemblies as Spaces for the Potential Mitigation of Climate Policy Misperceptions: A Survey Experiment	View Paper Details
Political Embedding of Climate Assemblies. How Effective Strategies for Policy Impact Depend on Context	View Paper Details
Can Democratic Innovation Work in an Unfavourable Context? Assessing the Effectiveness of the First Hungarian Local Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Policy	View Paper Details
Planetary Challenges, Global Responses: Facilitating Transnational Deliberation	View Paper Details