Increasing interest in various forms of public participation has been most evident at national and local levels. The growing prominence of global issues such as climate change has shifted attention to the question of how deliberative participation might be engaged on such issues. A recent public deliberation experiment called Worldwide Views provided some insights into the challenges and opportunities of such an effort. This paper examines the process that involved 100 citizens from each of 38 countries deliberating on the policy questions that faced international decision-makers at COP15 2010. They participated in a day-long discussion, following essentially a similar format and responding to one common set of structured questions. Recent work on public participation has located such initiatives centrally within their social-political contexts, challenging assumptions of the universality of deliberative processes. At the level of citizenship, relevant literatures have built on citizen identities as being bound up with social relations of place and other social identity categories. Climate change, on the other hand, potentially raises different identity formations, that of “communities of fate”. The discursive positions that emerged from these juxtapositions raise their own set of issues which we present by describing the Canadian and comparative experiences of ten other partner countries in the Worldwide Views endeavor (gleaned through in-depth interviews with their project managers). From these deliberations on climate change, we discuss these challenges on three levels: how to account for the recognition of cultural particularities around public participation (the discursive conditions), how to accommodate different national contexts and priorities on climate change (the issue conditions), and how global and local citizenship roles are enacted in the context of climate change as global governance problem (the institutional conditions). Through such social experiments, the place of democratic discourse in global governance contexts can be better understood and realized.
