Fit for Purpose? Recommendations of Citizens’ Assemblies and Urban Mobility

Citizens’ Assemblies (CAs) are often perceived as a possible remedy to the lack of trust in democracy, the rise of populism, the growing role of misinformation and disinformation as well as other challenges to modern democracies (OECD, 2020; Smith, 2024). Therefore, their role in building resilient democratic systems cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, democratic resilience means not only systemic endurance during political and economic crises, but also sustainable and effective policymaking in more peaceful environments. Democratic innovations such as CAs have a very significant role to play here. First, they bring together policymakers along with citizens while discussing important political topics (Dryzek, 2009), second, they enable representatives of different social groups to actively participate, which makes the process representative (MacKenzie, 2023), thirdly, depending on their characteristics, they may have a potential to shape public policies and, therefore, influence policymaking (Jacquet & van der Does, 2021; Vrydagh, 2022; Pogrebinschi & Ryan, 2018; Setälä 2017). In our article, we compare the roles of recommendations from Kraków (2023) and Stuttgart (2023) citizens’ assemblies on policies of sustainable mobility in these cities. Bearing in mind different integrative design features of these assemblies and their recommendations as well as different characteristics of public transportation in these cities, we assumed that their outputs (recommendations) may play different roles in sustainable mobility policymaking (Bussu & Fleuss, 2023; Font et al., 2017; Poole & Elstub, 2025; Pfeffer & Newig, 2025). Moreover, we observed that although scholars often investigate the impact of climate CAs (Willis, Curato and Smith, 2022; Smith, 2024), the CAs focused on sustainable mobility and their recommendations are somewhat understudied. Therefore, we decided to fill this gap and analyse the roles that different types of CAs’ recommendations may play in two different contexts, namely, German and Polish one, using case studies of Stuttgart and Cracow. Our empirical study starts from the categorization of the recommendations of both CAs according to three variables: type of policy measures, type of activity suggest in a recommendation and the type of impact they may have on a policy of sustainable mobility according to typology introduced by Vrydagh and Caluwaerts (2023). This enabled us to see the differences between two sets of recommendations and their expected impacts. In the next step, we conducted desk research focusing on official documents issued by local executive and legislative authorities in order to check whether the ideas expressed in the recommendations were present there. Lastly, we conducted semi-structured in-depth interviews with policymakers who were responsible for the implementation of the CAs’ recommendations and experts on urban mobility in both cities in order to confront their perspectives on the roles that the recommendations may play in policymaking on mobility. In the last step, we conducted thematic analysis of the interviews. The collected material enabled us to describe different types of roles that the CAs’ recommendations may play and, consequently, possible types of impact they may have on public policies.