Abstract
A lack of concerted action on the part of local authorities and their citizens to respond to climate change is argued to arise partly from a poor relationship between the two. Meanwhile, local authorities could have a significant impact on community-wide levels of greenhouse gas emissions because of their influence over many other actors, but have had limited success with orthodox voluntary behaviour change methods and hold back from stricter behaviour change interventions. Citizen participation may offer an effective means of improving understanding between citizens and government concerning climate change and, because it is inherently a dialogue, avoids many of the pitfalls of more orthodox attempts to effect behaviour change. Participatory budgeting is a form of citizen participation which seems well suited to the task in being quantitative, drawing a diverse audience and, when successfully run, engendering confidence amongst authority stakeholders. A variant of it, participatory emissions budgeting, would introduce the issue of climate change in a way that required citizens to trade off greenhouse gas emissions with wider policy goals. It may help citizens to appreciate the nature of the challenge and the role of local government in responding; this may in turn provide authority stakeholders with increased confidence in the scope to implement pro-environmental agendas without meeting significant resistance.
Highlights
There is overwhelming scientific consensus that anthropogenic climate change poses very significant threats to humankind’s future life on earth (Pittock, 2009)
Estimates vary as to the global average temperature rise that can be endured and the maximal concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere consistent with that rise (Rockstrom et al, 2009) but there is little disagreement amongst those who accept the reality of anthropogenic climate change that very major changes are needed in human behaviour in order to manage the risk
Given the indirect goals of this exercise, though, this attribute may seem less important. It is strongly argued in the literature on deliberative democracy that participants should have the freedom to contribute to the list of options (e.g. Christiano, 1996) and there is reason to think that participants’ satisfaction with a process of citizen participation will be enhanced by the ability to make such contributions
Summary
The required characteristics of a putative method of citizen participation were discussed in Section 4 in the context of a suitable question on which the participation would be centred. The concept of ‘‘participatory emissions budgeting’’ is introduced and explored
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