Evaluating the Austrian Climate Assembly: Input, Process and Output

Austria held its first national Climate Assembly (ACA) in 2022, comprised of randomly selected citizens and designed to be representative for Austrian’s society, to discuss and come up with concrete policy proposals to help Austria achieve its goal of climate neutrality in 2040. The ACA was born out of a public petition (Volksbegehren) supported by around 380,000 citizens in 2020 and was taken over by the country’s first conservative and green coalition government in 2021. One of the public petition’s core demands was to give the Austrian population an active say in climate policy. This paper assesses ACA’s design and analyses problems of deliberative settings, focusing on the input, process and output dimensions. We have four overarching objectives: First, understanding drivers, design, and outcomes of the ACA. Second, exploring the ways in which the ACA interacts with and connects to representative democracy. Third, identifying lessons learned for organizers and facilitators of future mini-publics. Fourth, contributing to the theoretical and practical development of deliberative systems and participatory decision-making in Austria and in international comparison.