Are citizen juries and assemblies on climate change driving democratic climate policymaking? An exploration of two case studies in the UK

Abstract

In light of increasing pressure to deliver climate action targets and the growing role of citizens in raising the importance of the issue, deliberative democratic processes (e.g. citizen juries and citizen assemblies) on climate change are increasingly being used to provide a voice to citizens in climate change decision-making. Through a comparative case study of two processes that ran in the UK in 2019 (the Leeds Climate Change Citizens’ Jury and the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change), this paper investigates how far citizen assemblies and juries are increasing citizen engagement on climate change and creating more citizen-centred climate policymaking. Interviews were conducted with policymakers, councillors, professional facilitators and others involved in running these processes to assess motivations for conducting these, their structure and the impact and influence they had. The findings suggest the impact of these processes is not uniform: they have an indirect impact on policy making by creating momentum around climate action and supporting the introduction of pre-planned or pre-existing policies rather than a direct impact by truly being citizen-centred policy making processes or conducive to new climate policy. We conclude with reflections on how these processes give elected representatives a public mandate on climate change, that they help to identify more nuanced and in-depth public opinions in a fair and informed way, yet it can be challenging to embed citizen juries and assemblies in wider democratic processes.

The Scope of Climate Assemblies: Lessons from the Climate Assembly UK

“…Thirdly, if AMs did decide that a split into thematic groups was appropriate to address the issue, it could have less impact on policy take-up as it would have been a decision taken by all the AMs themselves. Of course, the danger that the AMs take the remit of the assembly too far from the commissioning authority's interests and, in turn, reduces the potential for policy impact remains [59].…”

“…We believe these challenges can be overcome through effective assembly design and facilitation. Lessons should also be learnt from other cases [5,9,11,21,22,38,[58][59][60].…”

“…Our mixed method study of CAUK, that drew on surveys, interviews, and non-participant observation, found that dividing the AMs into different topic groups compromised the breadth of learning for many AMs and undermined their endorsement of recommendations from topic groups which they did not participate in. In turn, it has also hindered the potential of CAUK to influence UK climate policy as policy makers may feel less pressure to adopt recommendations coming from only a sample of the assembly, and thereby adding to the challenges for climate assemblies to influence policy [11,59].…”

“…This is, of course, just one case study, and due to the absence of research in this area our study is exploratory and therefore more empirical evidence on this vital topic is clearly required. Given the number of climate assemblies occurring across Europe at present [5,9,11,21,22,38,[58][59][60], many of which are implementing topic groups within the assembly, comparative analysis would therefore be welcome.…”

Large-scale disruptive activism strengthened environmental attitudes in the United Kingdom

“…The small longitudinal increase in polarisation in Citizens' Assembly support could be the result of such effects, together with positive effects of types not detected in the experiment. It is notable that many Citizens' Assemblies on climate have now occurred, including in the U.K., and that they tend to result in more radical proposals for climate policy than produced by government, but have been regarded as advisory rather than decision-making bodies (Duvic-Paoli, 2022; King & Wilson, 2022;Wells et al, 2021).…”