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.
Highlights
Current UK climate policies are not sufficient to meet UK climate targets (Committee on Climate Change 2019)
Through a comparative case study of the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change and the Leeds Climate Change Citizens Jury, this paper investigates how these processes may differ in practice, the impact they are having on policy and how they are engaging the public into climate change debates
There is a need for research to compare and contrast different methods used in the growing number of national and local citizen assembly processes (Capstick et al 2020), and to understand how citizen assemblies and juries on climate change are being used, as they may be used as a short-term consultation tool to give public legitimacy to political decisions which have already been made rather than to promote citizen engagement in policymaking and debates
Summary
Current UK climate policies are not sufficient to meet UK climate targets (Committee on Climate Change 2019). It has been argued that these deliberative tools are a method for increasing citizen engagement, bridging the gap and building trust between the scientific, political and social consensus on climate change and increasing the democratic legitimacy of climate policies by creating more citizen-centred policymaking (Willis 2020; Kythreotis et al 2019; Howarth et al 2020; Smith and Wales 2000; Willis 2018; Devaney et al 2020; Capstick et al 2020) They are important in the continuously evolving landscape of climate emergency declarations and resulting climate action plans requiring ‘new forms of democratic legitimacy’ which are increasingly concerned with embedding social justice and equity dimensions (Rode and Flynn 2020: 9). Through a comparative case study of the Oxford Citizens’ Assembly on Climate Change and the Leeds Climate Change Citizens Jury, this paper investigates how these processes may differ in practice, the impact they are having on policy and how they are engaging the public into climate change debates
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