Citizens’ Assemblies and Juries on Climate Change: Lessons from Their Use in Practice

Abstract

HighlightsCitizen assemblies and juries (CAJs) must meet generally accepted standards and be citizen-led to genuinely and credibly engage citizens. Agreed implementation and follow-up procedures should be established to ensure CAJs legitimately inform policymaking. CAJs are not a panacea to public participation on climate change and much more needs to be done beyond them.

When Digital Mass Participation Meets Citizen Deliberation: Combining Mini- and Maxi-Publics in Climate Policy-Making

“…As we know from other studies, it is mostly the disenfranchised or disaffected part of the public that is eager to participate in deliberative forums, whereas many others prefer exclusively supporting roles [62]. Nonetheless, processes that allow participants to come up with their own recommendations run less risk of being used as tokenistic exercises [61]. It is unfortunately not possible in our case to compare the sentiment of participant statements, had the six options been instead designed by energy policy experts only.…”

“…Thus the combination model allowed for different needs and intensity levels of participation, which has proven to be crucial for inclusive participatory processes on climate change [54]. Most deliberative mini-publics account for a minimum of 20 hours length to have sufficient time to learn and deliberate [61]. However, we could observe that it is still difficult for the low-educated to engage in either mini-or maxi-public devoted to climate policy-making.…”

“…Even though it was one of the largest and most diverse group of citizens that ever participated in local energy transition policy-making in the Netherlands, factors such as sparsely populated and remote areas and no representative citizens panel being available in the municipality contributed to the fact that some groups were overrepresented and others underrepresented. As the authors of [61] argue, representativeness is not a given and recruitment processes must be robust. However, we did not detect in our qualitative data that the local government sided with the affluent interests.…”

“…Stakeholders and researchers might therefore study the embedding of their mini-and maxi-publics in the larger political system and conduct outcome-orientated comparisons. According to the authors of [61], the biggest impact is to create a strong political platform for action by providing elected representatives with a public mandate on climate change. As we have seen in our case, politicians then often follow up with increased motivation for climate action.…”

“…(6) Participants of the mini-public valued that they could deliberate on different and conflicting viewpoints from the larger public since these would certainly resurface again in the many decisions that would follow in the next two decades. The public debate surrounding the mini-and maxi-publics was able to generate a public debate and increased momentum for policy change, something that the authors of [61] argue is crucial to the success of climate assemblies. Nevertheless, we can unfortunately not report how nonparticipants of both procedures assessed the combination approach.…”