The un-realised potential of deliberative mini-publics for sustainability transformations

The growing application of randomly-selected citizens assemblies to deliberate over responses to climate change is re-introducing an old idea to our democracies. They offer a glimpse of the potential of deliberative democracy theory, and the linked practise of deliberative mini-publics for better environmental governance, and supporting transformations to more sustainable societies. However, most sustainability scientists are not familiar with these concepts and methods, which have been growing in terms of their theoretical underpinnings, and through empirical experiments in the last few decades. We review how deliberative democracy, and deliberative mini-publics specifically, can respond to the challenges presented by recent sustainability science literature. We emphasise how they depart from mainstream theory and practises of environmental governance and stakeholder participation, with an emphasis on their key characteristic of sortition. We identify three key potential contributions of deliberative democracy for environmental policy: - Enhancing the science-society relationship, addressing concerns of scientific trust and legitimacy, supporting an informed discussion with citizens and informing a broadly defined sustainability that is responsive to diverse societal concerns and more resilient. - A new way to break open polarized environmental conflicts and mediate wicked trade-offs where selected expert knowledge is weaponised to reinforce partisan positions. - A practical means to enhance the transformative capacity of societies, advancing ideals of a radical ecological democracy We present a conceptual model that summarises the potential role of deliberative minipublics to positively affect the relationship between environmental policy, the public sphere, government and the potential for urgently needed transformations to more sustainable societies. Contrary to critiques of democracy for being too slow or ineffective to tackle the environmental challenges of our age, we conclude that we urgently need more and deeper democracy to avert environmental crises, and that deliberative minipublics are a key process to achieve this.