Abstract
In recent times we have seen a spate of climate assemblies across Europe as the climate emergency gains increasing prominence in the political agenda and as the citizens’ assembly approach to public engagement gains popularity. However, there has been little empirical research on how the scope of citizens’ assemblies affects the internal logic of the assembly process and its impacts on external policy actors. This is a significant oversight given the power of agenda setting. It is also of particular importance for climate assemblies given the exceptional scale and complexity of climate change, as well as the need for co-ordination across all policy areas and types of governance to address it. In this paper, we start to address this gap through an in-depth case analysis of the Climate Assembly UK. We adopt a mixed methods approach, combining surveys of the assembly members and witnesses, interviews with the assembly members, organisers, MPs, parliamentary staff, and government civil servants, and non-participant observation of the process. We find that attempts to adapt the assembly’s scope to the scale of the climate change issue compromised assembly member learning, the co-ordination of the resulting recommendations, assembly member endorsement of the recommendations, and the extent of their impact on parliament and government. We argue that more democratization in setting the agenda could help combat these issues.
Highlights
The citizens’ assembly approach to public engagement has gained popularity following perceived successes in Ireland [1]
We find that the attempts to adapt the assembly scope to the scale of the climate change issue compromised assembly member learning, the co-ordination of the resulting recommendations, assembly member endorsement of the recommendations and the extent that they impacted on parliament and government
Decisions about the length of Climate Assembly UK (CAUK) were determined by budget constraints and, crucially, the significant costs associated with member accommodation and travel that are unavoidable for in-person meetings
Summary
The citizens’ assembly approach to public engagement has gained popularity following perceived successes in Ireland [1]. Citizens’ assemblies are a type of mini-public They recruit a representative, or diverse, selection of members of the public through various forms of civic lottery (stratified random selection), provide the participants with information on the topic to be considered, and facilitate their discussion to promote deliberative norms and enable the participants to address the assembly remit [2]. They are thought to be more equipped at cultivating long-term thinking than traditional liberal democratic institutions [3,4] and a better way of engaging the public with the climate change issue than other methods [5]
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