Crowdsourcing Consensus on Climate Through Polis: Insights from Action Research and Design Thinking Approaches to Democratic Theory

Climate change can be understood as a collective action problem, requiring engagement and coordination from the personal through to the global level, and across civil society, public and private sectors. Addressing it therefore requires sufficient attention across these actors to match the urgency of the problem: no small feat in the highly competitive arena of important political issues communities must prioritise. Even when attention is paid to climate-related issues, urgent action is hampered by challenges of coordination. Divisions deepen, we struggle to find points of consensus for rapid action, and stalemates become entrenched among the various actors with misaligned senses of agency and responsibility. We can therefore bring into view two interconnected and critical challenges: to increase engagement in efforts to address climate change, and to improve the quality and productiveness of collective decision-making processes when people do engage. Sparks of possibility may be found by turning to the democratic innovations arising in communities around the world who continue to experiment with ways to improve their collective capacity to collaborate across diversity and enhance both environmental and democratic resilience. This includes advances in digital technologies, as well as the 'social technologies' around their use. Polis is a leading example of an emerging class of civic technologies designed to support increased participation in collective decision-making by crowdsourcing suggestions and revealing diversity of views as well as the points of consensus that cut across lines of division. This paper presents empirical insights from action-research case studies of the use of Polis for community decision-making on contentious issues relating to climate change in Australia: one on the topic of climate mitigation through air travel reductions, and another on adaptation to extreme heat. The analysis applied a novel theoretical approach in the study of democratic innovations and environmental politics based on design thinking concepts, including affordance theory and Democratic Design (Saward, 2021), in analysing the design of each of the democratic processes and the implementation of these designs in practice. This provided a foundation for normative and analytical responsiveness to particular contexts, perspectives and aims that were deemed pertinent in each of the case studies. In both cases, the uses of Polis were designed in the hopes of supporting more effective collective decision making on these climate-related issues by enhancing participation, revealing points of consensus across diversity of opinion (as low-hanging fruit for urgent action), and facilitating communication for better alignment between community members and institutional actors (both within and outside government). Drawing upon data from the Polis conversations themselves as well as surveys and interviews with participants and stakeholders and ethnographic action-research insights, this paper explores insights into the extent to which the democratic values that were prioritised in the case studies were realised in practice.