Studying the introduction of a climate assembly through an assemblage framework. The case of the Walloon Climate Citizen Panel in Belgium

The last few years have seen the proliferation of climate assemblies composed of citizens drawn by lot to deliberate on policy options to fight climate change. While some see them as an instrument of political strategy, others believe that they are proof of the democratisation of public action. The debate remains open today, particularly regarding the question of their influence on public decision-making. If citizens assemblies have been particularly scrutinized for a few years, recent critics indeed pointed out the over focus on those devices at the expense of their broader articulation with existing institutions, which allowed a certain shift towards the study of their external effects on the policymaking. However, in the study on the citizens assemblies effects on policy-making, one aspect has been often left behind, namely the question of their political and institutional integration (Boswell et al., 2022; Gourgues & Mazeaud, 2022). In particular, the phase of the introduction of such assemblies remains underexplored (Kübler et al., 2020) : why did they introduce citizens assemblies ? How has the added value of such a device been thought by various actors involved in their co-construction and how has the process been constructed in such a line ? Yet, such a question is likely to greatly condition the influence of the assembly on the decision-making process. The aim of that paper is therefore to study the introduction and production of climate assemblies by investigating whether and how the interest of this assembly in the public policy context in which it is situated was thought through by its instigators. That question is investigated through an in-depth case study of the Walloon Climate Citizen Panel which took place in 2021 in Belgium to feed the regional Air-Climate-Energy Plan. That study is carried out using an assemblage framework (DeLanda, 2006) approach to grasp the complexity of how such interest has been thought and co-constructed. The findings reveal how such a question is likely to be left pending, coming well after efforts to ensure the procedural conditions for a “good participation”. Despite an absence of a collective discussion on the concrete added value of such assembly, interviews show that for the policymakers with a climate agenda, the assembly would first and foremost make sense to ensure the acceptability of policy measures.