The Democracy–Decarbonization Dilemma: Can Climate Assemblies Provide an Escape Route?

To reach net zero emissions, governments must adopt climate policies that impose short-term costs and disrupt the livelihoods of many people in return for uncertain and remote long-term climate benefits. For these reasons, climate policies tend to be unpopular, and in many instances have provoked a backlash. Consequently, many politicians are tempted to abjure decarbonisation. In response, some scholars have proposed delegating climate policy-making powers to technocrats. Neither ‘solution’ is desirable, and both seem doomed to fail: failure to decarbonise will lead to runaway climate change that undermines the ecological and social foundations of democracy; while technocratically imposing stringent climate policies will fuel the rise of right-wing populist parties hostile to climate action. We call this the Democracy-Decarbonization Dilemma. Escaping it poses a central challenge for 21st century politics. In this paper, we explore a possible escape route: deepening democratic deliberation about climate policy. Deliberative mini-publics (DMPs) in the form of citizens’ assemblies focused on climate change, i.e. Climate Assemblies (CAs), have been touted as a means to increase public support for climate policy and increase the perceived democratic legitimacy of the policy-making process, hence escaping the dilemma. We propose a theory-driven causal model that delineates the mechanisms through which CAs could have such effects on the wider public. We test our model against the growing empirical literature on CAs specifically and DMPs more generally. We find mixed but overall encouraging evidence: the evidence suggests that, under certain conditions, CAs could build public support and acceptance for ambitious climate policy. To create these conditions, governments should increase the publicity of CAs, expand citizens’ opportunities to engage with them, and commit to taking their proposals. We conclude with a research agenda for a deeply democratic climate policy.